DOVE (Freeware)
Description
The year is 1999 and I followed my dream to finally create a cool game. Without any money and with no Unity/Godot/Unreal Engine available for free I used the only tool that I could get my hands on: Visual Basic, Paint and Fast-Tracker. I started with a little ship that fired on astroids and showed my masterpiece around. I started to create a first level with my own level-editor and asked everybody for help and to join me. Till the end coding was my responsibility, but every time when my motivation left me, some new music or some new graphic lay around in my inbox. One time I was especially surprised when Malte Kollmann send me a complete new level (- it's the last level before the final boss)! He learned my level-editor by himself. In the end, two years later, everything came together to a great game and in my mind - beside the bad graphics - DOVE still stands the test of time.
There was no Indi-scene and no Steam in the old times. I tried to send the game to different download-portals and some time even the big german magazine "Computer Bild Spiele" released DOVE on CD. I also heard the rumor, that DOVE was mentioned in the TV-Series COPS.
Compatibly issues
Sadly I lost the source code to this game. But it's still possible to play this on Windows Vista and higher!
- First install the game. If windows ask you afterwards if everything installed correctly answer with "yes".
- Install the dx7vb.dll. It's a dll that was used in old Windows to allow Visual Basic to use DirectX 7. Since this game uses both, this file is needed. Only a handful of programs ever tried to use DirectX7 in Visual Basic, so this dll is not popular and by default removed from Windows.
- Enable the compatibility mode for the DOVE.exe. Windows XP SP3 works for me. You don't need to set any special settings.
- You maybe need to run the program as an administrator. The reason is that the game tries to write data in its directory and maybe have not enough permission to do so. It will not ask for more permissions - it simply crashes.
Credits
DOVE was a product of a team of hobby game developers: Markus 'Kauto' Madeja (everything), Malte Kollmann (render-graphic), Toxeen (music), Hilmar 'HiBri' Brinkmann (additional graphics, intro), Hürgy Hasbh (musik, graphic), Manuel Kempf (pixel-graphic), xenion (ying-yong-fish), Harald CL (blade-enemy), Quasian (music), jori (music), Pickel (main-tester), Kay 'MontyP' Kollmann (translator)