Neut Tower (Shareware Episode 1)

Neut Tower is a puzzle adventure game about escaping an office tower after an earthquake. You are Jaye, a young programmer who has written Neut, a program made to explore the building's labyrinthine security systems. Jaye and Neut must work together to find their way out, and help those in need that they meet along the way.

Content Warning: Some mild swearing

This game was made entirely on actual hardware - a 286 with 4mb of RAM - with the only tools used that were written after 1992 being ones I wrote myself. No emulators were used to develop this game. All graphics not made inside the tile editor built into my engine were created with the shareware version of NeoPaint, and the code was written in Borland Turbo C 1.0 (with a dash of Turbo Assembler thrown in for good measure).

The engine has been in development since December 2018. In February of 2020 I entered the Global Game Jam and built out the initial game logic and first two levels.

All source code is included in the zip.  A git repository with full development history is also available on BitBucket. All game logic is defined in a custom Forth-based scripting language called Jorth, and can be edited by modifying the .JOR files. Completely new games could be built without recompiling the EXE, for those adventurous enough to learn the language. Compilation of JOR files happens on first load and produces JIM files; this process can be somewhat slow.

A full debug console is available on COM2 at 19200 baud. Run the "devon" command to enable full map editing functionality and the graphics editor, accessible with the "tab" key. (Alternately, you can edit GAMEBOOT.JOR to define the DEV constant to 1.) If there is interest I may write documentation in the future.