''Stargunner'' is a 1996 horizontal

scrolling shooter In computer displays, filmmaking, television production, and other kinetic displays, scrolling is sliding text, images or video across a monitor or display, vertically or horizontally. "Scrolling," as such, does not change the layout of the text ...

computer game published by Apogee Software and released for

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

Gameplay

The player controls a craft on a horizontal perspective going to the right. Enemies can approach from in front, from behind, from below or from above. They can be either lone flyers or formation ships. The maps have a linear quality in which enemies and power-ups appear at the same time and the same place, as is common with side-scrolling shooters. Gameplay is notably differentiated by high numbers of enemies and power-ups.

Plot

The game has two separate storylines; those being the one described in the official playing manual included with the CD-ROM copy and the one which is found on the

3D Realms 3D Realms Entertainment ApS is a video game publisher based in Aalborg, Denmark. Scott Miller (entrepreneur), Scott Miller founded the company in his parents' home in Garland, Texas, in 1987 as Apogee Software Productions to release his game ' ...

/Apogee website and portrayed in the game itself. In the official manual the story tells of the Barakians who entered Amdaran space in huge carrier ships with the notion of allying with the Amdarans. The peaceful people of Amdara helped the Barakians colonize a nearby planet after which the people of Barak revealed themselves to be a race out for blood and conquest. The Amdarans find themselves in a losing battle, their final hope are the titular Stargunners who are tasked with assaulting key Barak locations and fleets with the hope of crippling the enemy and turning the tide of the war. The ingame story is about the Zilians planning an assault on the people of Yitima. The Yitimans plan to preemptively strike at key Zilian strongholds before their forces can be mobilized. The reasoning behind the changes to the story are currently unknown

Development

The game was programmed in the C++ language. The artwork was done on a

Commodore Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved grap ...

computer using

Deluxe Paint Deluxe Paint, often referred to as ''DPaint'', is a bitmap graphics editor created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts and published for the then-new Amiga 1000 in November 1985. A series of updated versions followed, some of which were ported ...

Release

According to David Pevreal Apogee had originally intended to do an Amiga version of the game first and then port it to PC, but those plans were scrapped and only the PC version was released. On June 22, 2005, ''Stargunner'' was released as

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...

References

External links

Stargunner Official Website on 3D Realms
* {{Apogee Games 1996 video games DOS games Cancelled Amiga games Horizontally scrolling shooters Video games with pre-rendered 3D graphics Apogee games Linux games MacOS games Freeware games Video games with digitized sprites Games commercially released with DOSBox Video games developed in the United States Video games scored by Lee Jackson (composer) Windows games Single-player video games Science fiction video games WizardWorks games