The good news: it turns out I have an older copy of that C#/XNA platform game. Possibly the very same version in the screenshot.

That’s this one, for the record:

It’s so old, it’s made in VS 2008 and has a particle effect renderer that I scrapped after it wouldn’t upgrade to 2010.

And after testing it for a bit, I couldn’t find any in-your-face game breaking problems with the collision detection. It could stand to be perhaps a bit slower to better match the scale of things and fix the part where you can “hover” on the ceiling and…

Ah, right. That part. The part where you can’t actually go further to the left without jumping, and if you stand on the left half, face right, and then jump straight up you skip to the right.

I remember now.

Just about ten years ago, give or take about twenty days, I posted a very happy if short post on my old blog. It was a happy little song accompanying this screenshot:

C:\>If you're happy and you know it, syntax error
Syntax error.
C:\>If you're happy and you know it, syntax error
Syntax error.
C:\>If you're happy and you know it and you really want to show it if you're happy and you know it, syntax error
Syntax error.

You can tell it’s fuckin’ old cos it’s the Watercolor theme I used to have in Windows XP. And the level editor is made in Visual Basic 6.

I’d added things like scrolling and even moving platforms later on. I think the main character’d been replaced by an edited Mega Man ZX Aile by then? And I was so happy with my progress.

Then I somehow lost all the code.

I still have other projects from that time period, like a Touhou clone that featured Cirno as the player years before Fairy Wars came out, but not this. So weird, and such a shame.

Over time, I’d try again. By then I’d switched to C#/XNA and I got pretty far I liked to think.

I’m not sure how but things went downhill fast once I tried to fix a bunch of obvious problems. I can’t even remember how it all happened. At least this one I still have the code for… albeit it sorely broken code. I think this one copy I have around here has no collision detection at all, and this other one is totally broken. I think this screenshot is from just before I tried to implement slopes and found the first obvious wrong thing.

I never did get slopes in either game.

I feel like I should either take this and try to fix it, or take a step back and try it in C/SDL again. But either way, this fear of failure — I’m not even sure if that’s what it is but whatever — is holding me back from trying. I’ve fucked it up too often, maybe.

…but damn that was a good theme.