Trampoline Gunmen 1.5

Trampoline Gunmen stands as the series which I put the most effort into, and the one which seemed to be enjoyed the most by those who played it.

It all started in 1999. After a friend in the year above mine at high school introduced me to QBasic, I spent 6 months dabbling in game creation, making mostly awful derivatives of already available titles. My biggest hurdle was not learning how to do arrays until much later. In QB, if I wanted a bullet, it needed a line of code to draw it, another line for its movement, another line (or four) for when it went off screen, plus further lines for how it interacted with the player, enemies, other bullets and so on. One projectile could have 10 lines of code or more governing its behaviour. Five bullets and you’d need 50+ lines of code, unless you create an array which should control all projectiles under the rules of the initial 10 lines.

I couldn’t do arrays and so to keep my work easy, I made simple games.

My initial idea was for a target practice game: what if you were falling alongside a building and had to shoot through a window to cut some rope which would release a mattress at the bottom and save you. After a while I thought, what if there were people in the building shooting at you? What if you had to shoot back? What if you could bounce on the mattress and fly back up, shooting at them? From here the basic idea of TG formed: two people on trampolines, at either end of the screen, shooting at each other. Speed changing is handled like rocket thrusters: fire in the direction you are travelling to slow down, and fire in the opposite direction (behind you) to speed up. Each character has 3 speeds. To make things easier to code, each person could only fire 2 bullets at a time, meaning a maximum of only 4 projectiles to keep track of. It also seemed logical to have an ammunition box at the top of the screen to reload your ammo.

At first I called it Tramampolining Gunmen (based on the Simpson’s episode where Homer takes a free trampoline from Krusty), but this was confusing and so I eventually just called it Trampoline Gunmen. It proved popular at school, with a lot of kids wasting time in the computer room loading it up. There was very little sound, partly because I couldn’t get music to work correctly, but also because it allowed you to play unnoticed.

I went on to make other games, but regularly came back to my TG series, updating it with follow-ups, and at one point even creating a Dreamcast version with the help of another programmer.

This first game was 2 player only, based on the mattress minigame idea which ended up in TG: Minigame$. There were actually two versions of this first iteration, since the original contained a nasty bug which meant you couldn’t reload if any of your bullets happened to be on-screen when you touched the ammo box.