Dux

Dux is Commodore 64 game I developed around 1988 - '89. Grab the D64 image and try it out. It is kind of hard (some would say unplayable), but at the time I liked challenging games. It has got a few technical features that I am quite proud of (and rarely seen in commercial games), and the graphics and sound effects were fun to do. It was to be my ticket into the games industry, but by the end of it I was so sick of games programming that I got rid of my computers and went to university instead. After which I ended up a games programmer anyway...

I have an inch-thick printout of the assembly source, and some old disks with the apparant source code on them, so perhaps I will release those some day, if there is any interest for it.

Ooh, scary warning message. I was sending these out to publishers. Well, it's public domain now.


This is the loading screen. As you can see the game has nothing whatsoever to do with ducks. I was studying Latin at the time, and dux is Latin for leader.


Welcome message


The main title screen. Glowing DUX title with a vertical 'through the borders' credits scroller. Classy.


That is your ship flying in front of the title when you press start. Nice transition from the title screen to the game if I say so myself.


You start off in an asteroid field with some standard piddly lasers. You can get upgrades later on. Fly north from here to get to the main ship.


This is where it gets hard. Lots of energy barriers you need to maneuver through. There's some switches you can fly over to switch off energy barriers. There are also pickups for increased fire power, and there are some energy founts to replenish your shield power. If anyone ever gets this far, email me and I will write up some instructions.

-- Luc Van den Borre (luc at nuclide dot com).