Star Trek The Neutral Zone: Description

TREKCORE > GAMING > STAR TREK THE NEUTRAL ZONE > Description

Courtesy of Kresimir Spes.

 DESCRIPTION

This is a small deathmatch arcade game set in the TNG/DS9 universe. You play with a starship of your choice on a battlefield which is fixed on the size of your screen. You can choose from 15 different ship models, 8 backgrounds to play on, and 10 different powerups to pick up. Each ship has a forward phaser and two torpedoes. The goal is to destroy a certain amount of ships to win.

You can play in single player with smart bots or against a human oponent who can play on the same keyboard as you or in multiplayer over LAN and direct IP connection.

Additionally, you can adjust the game speed up to 300% and play with bots if you think you can't play against a worthy foe  :)

 HISTORY

I started development on this project when I was 16, in the second year of high-school. I really didn't intend to make an actual game of it though. I badly needed some network programming experience in order to make the multiplayer of "The Kings of the Dark Age". So in order to turn this task into something more interesting, I borrowed a few starship images from Activision's "Star Trek: Bridge Commander", dug up a few background images and put it all together. Below are a few images of how it was in the beginning:

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The breaking point was when I took the "game" to school and showed it to my friends. They really liked it and encouraged me to continue developing the game. Over the next few months I slowly worked on the project and added the much needed shields and fixed a whole bunch of bugs. Geez, what stupid mistakes I made back then! :)

Over time I really got to like the project, so I spent all my free time developing the game. And so, version 1.0 was born. I was so proud of it! Version 1.0 got published in several Croatian computer magazines, which made me reeealy happy!

And once again it was the players who encouraged me to continue developing. Heh, version 1.0 didn't even have bots!

So in February 2004, version 2.0 was finished and it had the folowing crucial features:

  1. single player support
  2. 2 players on the same keyboard
  3. you could actually configure the controls now :)
  4. powerups! - excellent stuff!

And that's when it all ended. There was nothing I could do to make the game better, so starting in February of 2004 I started designing the sequel, TNZ2! Hundreds of papers were used and dozens of pencils until I finally made the game design I wanted.

So now, October 2004, I'm working on TNZ2 which will most likely be a freeware game. You can read all about it and see the artwork and screenshots or even download the game, if I've finished it by now, from: https://tnz2.cateia.com.