Alby vs Balby

The Game

Alby vs Balby is a Minesweeper Adventure adaptation about two lab mice maneuvering through a minefield to reach the cheese.

It combines Minesweeper with character movement and a racing mechanic. On top of that, confident players can activate even more mechanics to make it harder for both: a fan pushing the mice forward, laser turrets whose shots have to be dodged and and/or aura that mirrors both players' controls.

The players play three rounds. Whoever has reached cheese the most or died the least wins.

The Creation Process

This game was created during a programming course in university. We had 10 weeks: 5 weeks of programming practice and another 5 to create a Minesweeper Adventure-esque game with the newfound knowledge. The name of the studio I roleplayed was Two Mice Studios.

Although game design and art were no priority, I'm pretty proud of the result. Keeping to a washed out color scheme for the environment, saturating every element important for the interface and coloring all hazards in a bright red-yellow scheme makes the game really intutive to play. The code however...

"If you're not ashamed of your code after you've written it, you didn't improve" - I don't know where I picked up this saying, but it does ring true. The code is an atrocity, I'm surprised runs at all. I didn't have much coding experience before that. I dabbled in Python and Java while studying computer science some years back, but I forgot most of it because being an officer didn't need me to code. C-based languages were completely new to me and we had to use SDL 2, which sure didn't help. Also, don't ask me why, but I really wanted to code an Entitiy Component System (ECS) simply because it fascinated me. It's total overkill for a simple game like this but somehow it worked!

Special thanks to Darleen Malinowski, she created the player sprites and designed the characters, and Lucas Hinz for allowing me to use his music.