Lizards – Remaking my own game?

Games Development / December 15, 2004 / John / 0

I’ve just come across the source code for Linux Lizards on an old ftp site 🙂 For those not in the know (i.e. everyone), Lizards was the first game I ever wrote. The timestamp on the source code says November 10th 1995 – 11 days before my first child was born. The game was charming in an incredibly bad way and could very well be used as an example of how not to write games. It was written to run under SVGAlib on the Linux console and therefore had to be run as root, via sudo or by making the exe setuid root. Trouble is, it had an utterley stupid (on my part) exploit at the end – a system call to “clear” with no path, basically allowing anyone who could create a file named clear in the current dir to spawn a root shell. Oh dear. I’m older and wiser now 🙂

I’m going to port it to run under allegro cos I really REALLY want to see it again! It has knitted monsters!

John

UNIX geek, wannabe cook, musician, book-lover, and all round good-guy.