Outscape ~ The Annhilation was my first attempt at writing a game in C++, made after I moved on from DarkBASIC Pro to Dark GDK. I would say version 1 looks rough because I was learning the language and the game at the same time, but that is being a bit generous with myself. The name came from my two favourite games from my childhood, Outwars and RuneScape.
I would play Outwars endlessly, listening to Guns N Roses, so-much-so, that when I listen to Axl Rose, I still get mental flashbacks of trying to navigate with the jetpack.
Your mission in version 1 was to destroy the evil bobs, which were red spheres, with a bow that could only fire one arrow at a time.
Somehow, by versions 4 and 5, I had strangely got the idea of setting the game in Russia, where you were meant to be some sort of agent in a post-apocalyptic world.
I had a habit of trying to do everything by hand. It made the results less impressive than they could have been, and I'm still proud of what I worked out to make things run. The models are mostly not mine, but the code is, including the water reflections in version 5. I already had an aversion to existing game engines, and preferred to make my own so I'd learn more.
I therefore had moved from DarkBasic (which is a basic-like language), to DarkGDK (which is a graphics engine library for C++), mostly out of masochism rather than any sort of coherent quantifiable reason.
I see the irony of me submitting my video for "univercity". The title of the article is also not a spelling mistake, well it is, but it is the variant of "annihilation" which I seemed to think was correct at the time. Luckily, I was not submitting for an English course.