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© 1997 by Mike Linkovich
SKRAP is a Win95/DirectX game for PCs developed by the startup game development / multimedia company Neuronware Entertainment located in Toronto, Canada. The development of the game progressed up to the point of a very polished, 6 level playable demo that was released publicly back in the fall of 1997. It appeared on various gaming magazine cover CDs, including PC Gamer and PC Games.
The bulk of the work was done by yours truly, including all programming, most of the artwork, sounds and of course, play testing. Additional artwork was graciously provided by Nicolas Kadima, our original website was designed by Andrew Harris and some of the promotional print material was designed by Mike Nice. Additional sounds were developed by Fitsum Belay. Invaluable playtesting, feedback and ideas were also contributed by John Martin, Rafael Alvarez and Gerard Lobo throughout the game's development.
My programming skills at the start of the project were hopelessly rusty, and I was almost entirely oblivious to modern programming techniques. Invaluable help was provided by numerous posters on Compuserve's GAMEDEV forum as well as the old DirectX beta developer forum.
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••••••••
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download
(skrapsw.exe 4MB)
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Downloading and Installing
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Requires: A Pentium or faster PC running Microsoft Windows (95,98,ME,2000 supported). Download the file to your hard drive. Double-click it and it will ask you for the install directory. Enter something sensible (like 'C:\Program Files\SKRAP\') and extract the files. To star the game, open the folder you just installed into and double-click the SKRAP.exe file.
Note: This game was last worked on years ago. If you can't get it to work on your system there won't be much I can do about it. Still, despite its age (and my own skills at the time, or lack thereof) it seems to run on most machines these days. Some things run a bit fast on fast machines because I failed to implement proper timing code throughout the game. Setting your monitor's refresh rate to 60Hz might help, as that will cap the framerate at 60fps. You might experience problems if you run it at rates faster than 85Hz.
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About SKRAP
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SKRAP is a real action game. My idea was to reproduce a game as slick and finely-tuned, playability-wise as William's arcade games from the 80's, but to do it in 3D using Microsoft's DirectX and all of its hardware acceleration capabilities.
The game's play-model was extrapolated from the old Apple ][ game called Rescue Raiders. It's a tough, mean bastard but I think any hardcore action fan will find it a highly rewarding play.
Unfortunately, like so many other startup game development projects, this game was never finished due to lack of time, resources and the funding of a publisher. It was a one-man project for the most part. Both the company who hired me and myself underestimated the amount of work involved to produce a full commercial release -- something I won't attempt again by myself, but it was fun while it lasted.
Print Artwork
Neuronware went so far as to place ads in both PC Gamer and PC Games magazine. Below are the ads that appeared in the September, October and November 1997 issues. The irony of it all is those 3 ads appeared in what were probably the biggest PC Gamer and PC Games magazines ever. Remember that Christmas '97 was probably the most bloated year ever for PC game product. There were so many ads that year -- including many multi-page ads, and ad space was at such a premium that ours wound up being buried at the back. And frankly, after 400 pages of mostly game ads, your message gets pretty much lost!
I thought they were pretty cool. If we really had enough of a budget, and we had tried it in any year except 97 (or maybe 98), I think we could have generated a lot more buzz.
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