Midline

Midline is a small MS-DOS game that will challenge your dexterity!
How long can you follow a line without touching it?

Gameplay

Using your mouse, move the two white balls along the line without touching it! 

You can rotate the balls clockwise (left mouse button) or counter-clockwise (right mouse button). 

Beware, every 500 points the game will run faster! How long can you survive?

You can also press the "M" key to enable / disable the music. 

Press the "D" key to display some debugging information on how the game runs on your machine (e.g.: game ticks (should be 30/seconds), frame-rate (30 fps or over is ideal) and RAM memory usage).

Technical requirements

To play the game, simply unzip "midline.zip" on your hard-drive and launch "midline.exe". The game will automatically save the current highscore if it's running from a writable device.

Beware, this game won't run natively on Windows! Indeed, this game is a real MS-DOS program. It should run on any vintage computer starting with a 386 DX 33mhz, but a 486 DX 33 or above is really recommended for a smoother experience.

You can also play the game using an MS-DOS emulator like DOSBOX (about 8000 cycles recommended, but it's playable starting with 6000 cycles)

If your computer have 8mb of RAM or less, or if you want to speed up the game startup loading, you can disable sound (the game will then only use ~300kb of memory in total instead of ~700kb of memory in total with sounds).

To do so, simply add the "nosound" parameter at command line when launching the game: 

"midline.exe nosound"

Last but not least, you'll obviously need a mouse to play this game, as it's a mouse-only game!

About

This game is actually written 100% in LUA, thanks to the wonderful LoveDOS engine. 

I started this project back in 2020, and never got to complete it. When I discovered the DOSember Game Jam, who challenge us to make a DOS game either by starting a new one or by resuming an abandoned project, I remembered about "Midline". This jam was the perfect opportunity to finally complete and release this game!

The music used in the game is titled 2014 Intro (Loop) composed by Conal Rhys Fawcett and released under CC-BY license:
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/562452

So here it is. The game is simple (I wanted it to run on a 386DX device) but should be fun and challenging for a few minutes :).

Looking for challenge?

My current best score is 1774 points. Can you do better?

An open source game

The retro games homebrew communities are wonderful places where people create new games for old consoles for the fun of it, and love to share their work and knowledge with others. So whenever I can, I try to contribute too by documenting and sharing the source code of my games, hoping it may help others to make their own games.

In addition to the game EXE, you'll find a zip file containing the fully commented source code of the game. As detailed in the README inside the zip file, the source code is released under the MIT license, and the assets (graphics and audio) under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. The game was programmed 100% in LUA using the wonderful LoveDOS engine. Please don't hesitate to ask me if you have any questions about the source code or how the game works.