As my long-time fans are aware, back around the start of 2009 I had started work on Space Fortress 2, a sequel to my second-ever C++ game Space Fortress, which was set to be my next shareware game. Originally, based on my experience with Super Minesweeper and PixelShips Retro, I expected it to take about two months to make. However, numerous personal problems interfered with development, and the development process itself was taking much longer than anticipated due to all sorts of unforseen difficulties. (Would you believe I spent an entire day just trying to make the three bolts fired by the Triaser weapon align properly?)
Roughly around when the gameplay component was completed and I had started work on the menu system, I finally got a job after searching for over three years: a call centre job that was pretty lame... actually, let me clarify that. The actual job I was expected to do was lame, but the people I worked with were nice, understanding people for the most part, including my managers, who eventually let me quit due to my sleeping problems getting out of control, as opposed to firing me, so that I would be welcome to reapply in the future should my sleeping problems ever get fixed.
Said job however cut severely into the amount of time I could spend working on this game, and made it impossible to make any real progress. As such, I had to abandon it for the time being and eventually, when I finally noticed the change in the way indie game design was playing out, I realized that this game no longer fell into my design goals. I decided I would fix up what was there with a rudimentary menu and release the unfinished game as freeware.
...but even THAT got sidetracked because I started Ancient DOS Games. :/
However, now that I have the time to work on both my web show and a game project together, I decided to put Vectorzone aside for just a little to finally do what I was originally going to do: Get Space Fortress 2 into a playable state and release the unfinished game as freeware... and thus, here we are. :)
I consider v0.1z of Space Fortress 2 to be a "Suspended" release, in that I'm not abandoning it entirely, but have no immediate plans to finish it up and turn it into a complete game. I'm also not against allowing someone else take up the challenge to complete it, but I will only consider such a request from someone who has established themselves somewhere on the net and has released at least one non-free game or several free games.
You will also require the MSVC10 Redistributable Package if you do not have it installed already.
The game can indeed run inside a window, as it normally defaults to full-screen. Open the DEFAULT.SF2 file in a text editor (it should be in the folder you extracted the game to) and change the vidmode parameter to 1. There are other settings too but I don't recommend changing them.
Below are some screenshots of the game. Click on one to enlarge it!
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