Kenneth Manta's programming history

This page displays some of the projects I have programmed over the years. I have coded every line of each of these programs. Additionally every image was also edited/rendered by me.

Marbles Date: 2004 Platform: Pentium 4 3.0Ghz Language: Visual C++/Open GL I developed Marbles in two weeks for Sleazysoft's Codefest, a game programming competition. Players control a marble and attempt to destroy the other marbles on the level by either knocking them into a pit or damaging them on spike balls.

Download Marbles

The Ship Game 4 (In development) Date: 2003/2004 Platform: Athlon 900Mhz Language: Visual C++/Open GL

Download the Ship Game 4

The Ship Game 3 Date: 1998 My Age: 18 Platform: Pentium 133 Language: Visual C++/Assembly The Ship Game is a highly addicting strategy and real time battle game. Two players construct space ships out of various components and use these to battle each other. Ship construction can become very complex. If a player desires missiles, the player must construct them out of the various components including power sources, control centers, wheels, engines, thrusters, explosives, sensors, and many more. It uses a simple physics engine I wrote. Each ship component has varying mass, bounce, friction, heat tolerance, durability, and other properties specific to the component. As always with my later games, each pixel is rendered using my own custom assembly graphics library.

Download the Ship Game 3

Slayers 4 Date: 1996 My Age: 16 Platform: Pentium 133 Language: Quick C/Assembly Slayers is a turn based game where up to 4 players can battle against either each other or against an artificial opponent. Each player recruits armies, equips them with weapons, and battles one another earning bounties. Players can find hidden underground passages containing treasures, captive creatures, and passages revealing new areas. The artificial intelligence is excellent; using multiple creatures to team up and hunt your army down and retreating when defeated. Special assembly routines were designed to generate fast stone patterns and cast shadows on any background.

Putcut Date: 1996 My Age: 16 Platform: 80386 Language: Quick C/Assembly This program displays a 3D image that can be rotated in two dimensions. The image is generate using a technique known as voxels. A voxel image consists of thousands of points individually transformed and drawn on the screen. This program was actually designed without the knowledge of this technique. It was years later that I was made aware that this technique had been used elsewhere. A technique was also developed which could perform very fast transformations on each voxel making the engine almost usable on an 80386 processor. On modern PCs it can do hundreds of frames per second(Primarily limited by the bandwidth to the video card). It uses assembly routines called by a C program.

The Ship Game 2 Date: 1995 My Age: 15 Platform: 80386 Language: Quick C/Assembly This game was almost identical to the original ship game. It featured much improved graphics and features to assist with the construction of ships. New assembly routines were used to scale images as they were rendered to the screen. No images available

Weirdos 2 Date: 1995 My Age: 15 Platform: 80386 Language: Quick C/Assembly This was my first game that used custom assembly routines to render the graphics. Every pixel in the entire game was rendered using my own assembly routines. The game involves designing a custom 'weirdo' which can have varying weight, speed, jump height, and actions that can be performed and battling your way to the exit on each level. On each level unique computer controlled weirdos jump from platform to platform and attack to prevent you from reaching your goal.

Download Weirdos

Super Paint (Spaint) Date: 1994 My Age: 14 Platform: 80386 Language: QBASIC At this time I began to realize that available colors have more of an impact on an image than resolution. For this reason I decided to switch from 640x480 resolution with 16 colors to 320x200 with 256 colors. I however did not have any image designing software that supported 256 colors so I made my own! Spaint has many advanced features such as image blur, highlighting, shading, standard primitives, easy palette manipulation, color blending and tiled image editing. Games using images designed by this program have a smiley next to their name.

Metroid Date: 1994 My Age: 14 Platform: 80386 Language: QBASIC This game stretched QBASIC to its limits. It features huge maps that could take days to explore. The source code eventually became too large for QBASIC to handle and was divided into two seperate programs. The maps are divided into sections which are swapped to the hard disk as necessary. The gameplay involves finding and destroying eggs hidden away in your opponents fortress. Along the way you can collect powerups to increase characteristics such as your bullet power, increased jump height, the ability to fire through walls and much more. Players familiar with the Nintendo game Metroid will find these powerups, creatures found in the game, and the terrain itself very familiar. Care was taken so that these creatures behaved almost exactly like in the original Metroid.

Marbles 3 Date: 1994 My Age: 14 Platform: 80386 Language: QBASIC

Lemmings Date: 1994 My Age: 14 Platform: 80386 Language: QBASIC

Space Wars Date: 1994 My Age: 14 Platform: 80386 Language: QBASIC

The Ship Game Date: 1994 My Age: 14 Platform: 80386 Language: QBASIC

Dinowars Date: 1994 My Age: 14 Platform: 80386 Language: QBASIC

Weirdos Date: 1993 My Age: 13 Platform: 80386 Language: QBASIC

Copyright © 2004 by Kenneth Manta
Metroid is a registered trademark of Nintendo of America
Lemmings is a trademark of Psygnosis