Equilibria

A rolling (non-interactive) preview for a game created from scratch during the DOS Games July 2024 Jam.

I fully intend to complete this game, but unfortunately I spent so much time on tech that a non-playable preview was all I could manage for the jam! Part of the issue was also that my initial gameplay idea turned out to be a non-starter, forcing me to throw out an awful lot of stuff.

To run the demo under modern Windows, drop DOSBox-Staging (from the "Portable ZIP" download) into the 'dosbox' directory - the 'dosbox.exe' file should end up in the 'dosbox' directory. Once that's done, use 'run.bat' or run dosbox directly.

For a custom DOSBox setup, I recommend sbpro2 or sb16, and ~22000 cycles. For real hardware, the ideal spec is a 66MHz 486 and a VLB/PCI VGA card, but it should at least run on any 486 system. 4MB of RAM is plenty. It requires a Sound Blaster (hopefully any should work) and a mouse.

This was written from scratch in C and ASM with OpenWatcom. The only external library it uses is miniz for decompression; which may go away in a future build. No AI generated art was used. Uses a public-domain font by gnsh, and UPX for final packing. Art was mostly made in ArtRage Vitae; downsampled with a custom tool and touched up in Paint Shop Pro X2. Music was made with Renoise and the ADLplug VST, then converted to a custom module format.