Sacred Software

memset 0x801 is a game inspired by Micro Fun's Miner 2049er, a game released in 1982 for the Apple II (and various other systems). It takes place on a microscopic level inside a computer. You are a being of pure electricity, whose job is to zero bytes in memory. This is accomplished by simply walking over each byte in the level. Once you have zeroed all the memory in the level, you can proceed to the next.

You may run into compiler warnings lurking in the level. Don't get too close to them, or you may trigger a bug that will corrupt memory and delete you. If you pick up a source file, you'll have a limited time to fix the compiler warnings. Pointers and strings allow you to travel from one block of memory to another. Strings can be traversed at will, but pointers only go one way, and take you to their destination immediately if you walk over the bytes from which they originate. You can also jump for short distances, but be careful not to fall too far - as an electrical being, you are very unstable, and too long of a fall may destroy you on impact.

memset 0x801 was originally entered into a classic game remake contest, known as "Carlosvision", at iDevGames. In its unfinished state at the time, it received second place out of five entries, just a hair behind the first place winner. I figured it would be a relatively quick and easy project to take the unfinsihed contest entry and turn it into a complete game, but it turns out it wasn't such an easy task - the contest entry was written in three weeks, but it took more than another four months to fully complete the project!

Part of the reason that it took so much longer than I expected was that I was going for a much higher standard of quality than I had with any previous project. As such, I was forced to tackle many more hurdles along the way than I otherwise would have been. With the lessons I've learned from this project, I expect to be able to have a quicker turnaround time on full completion of projects, and I intend to raise the bar to this level of quality for future projects.