Over the Top By Piga Software Version 1.0 November 11, 2011 - Introduction- In late 2010 I started making a series of holiday themed games, in the fashion of my earlier release Piga's Pumpkin Carving. After remaking an old design of mine for Thanksgiving, and updated the aforementioned Halloween program, Remembrance Day (Veteran's Day in the USA) was the next important event on the Canadian calendar. I had no immediate intention of creating a game for it until three days before the day. The subject of thousands of soldiers and civilians dying in what turned out to be a rather pointless war of European imperialism is not something to be taken lightly, and as such to create any sort of entertainment product surrounding it needs to be done with care. In the end, it was nowhere near done by the time the day came - so I punted it until next year and, after two more weeks of work, here we are. Anyhow: The Second World War has had many games based on it, such as Muse/id Software's Wolfenstien series or Steven Spielberg's Medal of Honour (Allied Assault, if only in buggy beta, came to GNU/Linux somewhat due to Ryan C. Gordon, sadly he could not finish it or make a client for the expansions), which largely is due to that conflict being seen as easier to deal with. Few modern commentators would debate the terrors of the Nazis and other fascist regimes in Europe, and few would doubt that the war mostly flushed them out. The Nazi world view in its complete genocidal madness itself has caused it to be handled through comedy to ridicule its horrible conclusions, as is shown by the rather tongue-in-cheek tones of say Return to Castle Wolfenstien. The First World War on the other hand is a different matter. First of all, there is little that can be seen as glorious about it: soldiers being cramped into horrible muddy trenches for months on end until the call to go over the top arrives and they are all mostly cut down by Gatling gun fire within minutes. This general gloominess is why there are so few First World War video games, alongside the fact that both hanging out in the trenches and dying so certainly would not make for very fun play. I decided that my game would show the terror of the war as well as try and provide a challenging experience. The game features two trenches on either side of the screen, you play as a soldier going over the top on one side and must make it into the other trench and clean it out. This involves going through the enemy's machine gun fire as you cross no man's land. You are joined by several other soldiers, but almost all of them tend to be wiped out rather quickly. This death toll will hopefully give the player an understanding of what happened at the birth of the 20th century. A major inspiration for some of the tone of this work comes from Blackadder Goes Forth, which used the sheer absurdity of the war for comedy and featured a rather poignant ending when the main character's themselves, presumably, perish going over the top. It is known as one of the most unexpected endings in television history - and some today still have mixed feelings about it. - Gameplay - The player takes the role of an unnamed soldier in the trenches of the Western Front. It is never stated what nationality this batch is, though it would have to either be French or Commonwealth given the entire span of the war is presented here. The first soundtrack piece is a British recruiting song, so that may give you some hints, though the American song "Over There" plays for the 1917 push - when the Americans joined the war. Anyways, you can move the player around with the arrow keys, and the objective is get out of your trench, cross no man's land, while dodging invisible machine gun fire, and storm the enemy trench - either killing (press space to fire your sidearm) or capturing (press the enter/return key) the Patroller and Gunners. You are joined by three other Allied soldiers, but do no get attached to them as they are little more than cannon fodder. As a matter of truth, they actually have no offensive programming at the movement - though this may change in later releases. After storming the trench, the game snaps to the next push a year later - and you have to do it all over again. Each year the Germans improve their Gatling guns, and thus they need to cool down for less and less time. This makes each new push more and more difficult. It should also be noted that there are no lives in this game - as in the real thing, if you die you die and you will not get to report in unless you survive the war. Thus this whole thing should hopefully be something of a challenge - and help give you a taste of how nasty war can be! Tell that to the next army recruiter you encounter! - Family History - I am the descendant of two veterans of the First World War that I know of; though neither fought for my current country of Canada and were in fact on different sides. My great-grandfather on my mother's father's side was a Ukrainian living in Poland who was drafted into the Austrian-Hungarian Army to fight for the Hapsburgs. During this time he saw the now little discussed horrors of the Eastern Front, where men were often forced to resort to hunting each other down with whatever they could come across. One particular event of stark horror he would recall was stabbing a man to death with his bayonet, though many around him were resorting to non-standard issues such as pitchforks. As he would later relate, in any other circumstance he might well have had a drink with the man but in that situation it was either kill or be killed. His involvement was finally ended by him being captured by the forces of Imperial Russia, where he was taken off to Siberia as a prisoner of war. During the confusion of the Russian Revolution, however, he managed to escape and on-foot he trekked back to his homeland, reputedly meeting and shaking the hand of Vladimir Lenin himself and witnessing with them some of the extravagances of the Czarist nobility - most vivid was the image of fur-lined toilet seats. He did in the end make it back to his home village, before he and his family emigrated to Canada in 1929, sensing that another war was inevitable. Their prediction was proven correct, but their move to Canada saved my grandfather from the next war - he was only just being looked into when it ended. My great-grandfather on my father's father's side was put into the British Army and was also captured by the enemy. He did survive though and returned to Britain where he was looked down upon for having been captured. Avoiding the unfair ridicule, he emigrated to New Zealand as his chosen sanctuary. - Graphics Notes - I admit that the graphics are not entirely period accurate in terms of uniforms and equipment - especially considering that both the Allied and Central Powers forces look the same - but I was using what graphics I had available. I also apologize for the rather cannon-like machine guns. My source of multimedia for this game largely came from Reiner's Tilesets, which is an excellent site for those needing decent live-rendered or pre-rendered 3D graphics for games. The irony of using graphics made by a German might be palpable, but I would desire player's to feel just as much for the poor German soldiers who died, as well as civilians that suffered, during the war as much as they would for those on the Allied side. A life is a life. Hopefully the use of period era illustrations and a wide collection of 1910s songs helps infuse some more authenticity. Some may also notice that the icon for this title is the white poppy. Doubtless most people who play this will have heard of the symbolism of the red poppy and of the Canadian written poem "In Flanders Fields" that inspired it, so they will understand the choice of symbol, but they probably will not all realize the importance of the colour. Over the years, the red poppy has been hijacked to celebrate, rather than grimly remember, war and militarization. In response, peace activists have instead taken to using the white poppy, at very least in conjunction with the red one, to make it quite clear that we seek to remember those who died and want to make it so no more have to. Violence is perfectly alright in games but not in real life: one of the cleverer lines by Running With Scissors, of Postal series fame. - Compatible Systems - Over the Top is built in the Gambas programming language and thus will run on any system that the Gambas run-time will work on. This includes most POSIX systems such as most versions of GNU/Linux including Fedora, Mandriva, SUSE, Debian and Ubuntu as well as FreeBSD. Sadly at this time the Gambas run-time has not been ported to Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X (work on the latter is on-going) and there are no current plans for Piga Software to create a port to either of those platforms through similar BASIC type languages such as Visual Basic .Net or a Mac OS X equivalent. Being made in Gambas, and free software, it can be edited, modified and extended on any of the compatible systems stated using the Gambas integrated development environment (IDE). Also, if anyone should wish to port the Gambas run-time to Windows or Mac OS X we would be in your debt and if you wish to port any of our programs, including this one, through any means to other platforms we would give you our full support. - Installation - As is stated above this program can only be run on certain POSIX compliant systems like GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. There are four different ways to install it onto your system however. Before you try any of this though you should check and see if you have the Gambas run-time properly installed; it is available from most software repositories such as the system ones for Debian, Fedora, Mandriva and Ubuntu and can be built for others. Afterwards, the first option is to just run the executable "Remembrance.gambas" and it should work fine through the run-time. The second option is to download the Gambas project and source code yourself and run it through the development environment, though this requires that you get the Gambas IDE package. Thirdly you can also use the GNU Autotools installer which creates the program with a GCC make-file. Finally if you are running an RPM-enabled GNU/Linux distribution such as Fedora, Mandriva or SUSE you may download a select RPM installer from our icculus.org server. This should allow you easy installation and even get dependencies like the run-time if you do not already have it. One day we also hope to offer up DEB installers for Debian and Ubuntu systems when we have the resources to maintain a Debian machine to build them on. In the mean-time if you want an installed copy on those systems you may download the source code, load it up in the development environment, build a DEB yourself and use it. - Credits - Game Concept, Programming and Editing: Graham L. Wilson Music: FirstWorldWar.com, Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/) Sound Effects: Public Domain Sources Sprite Graphics: Reiner's Tilesets (http:///www.reinerstilesets.de/) Textures: TextureLib (http://www.texturelib.com/) Decorations: OpenClipart (http://www.openclipart.org/) Graphics Edits: Malcolm Wilson Multimedia (http://icculus.org/mwm/) Special thanks to BenoƮt Minisini and the other Gambas developers. Graham L. Wilson, Technical Director, Piga Software http://icculus.org/piga/ http://piga.tropicalwikis.com/ http://piga.7.forumer.com/