Description

Debris was a fairly successful shareware game that has since been discontinued. It was originally released in the late Windows 3.1 era / early Windows 95 era, first as a 16-bit application and later as 32-bit. As such it is a bit dated as far as technology goes (DirectX was just in its infancy) and has some really wacky "leftovers" in its interface from this odd transition period. Still, according to most who played it, it was a fun game.

The purpose of this page is just to provide a bit of history about the game itself for those who may be curious, or for those who acquired the game before it was discontinued and would like an "official" (as in "verified by the author") list of cheats and such.

Screenshots

2 Player Madness 640x480 121k Instructions 640x480 124k Collage 600x800 192k

Cheats

This list of cheats is for the last release, identified as "Debris 32, Version 1.2" in the About Box. To enter a cheat, press the Backspace key during the game to open the command dialog, enter the cheat into the text box and press the OK button.

Note: The cheat codes are shown in upper case, but may be typed in lower or mixed case, it doesn't matter.

The following two cheats work for both the shareware and registered version:

The following gameplay cheats work only for the registered version:

The following debugging cheats work only for the registered version:

The following command-line options are recognized to run the game in higher resolution: (note that only the in-game portion will actually use the higher resolution, menu screens and such will simply be inset into the larger screen)

Secrets

There were a number of undocumented special bonuses given out if you did certain things in the game. I'll have to dig up the source code to remember them all (so consider this a work in progress) but here's what I remember off the top of my head...

Mines - Yes, you can destroy them. They require 32 units of damage to destroy, so either 32 hits with the regular "white" ammo, or 16 hits with 2X "red" ammo, 11 hits with 3X "green" ammo, or 8 hits with 4X "blue" ammo. A mine will always release a white bonus item (outrigger or bombs) when destroyed.

Aliens - If you just hang out on a wave and avoid the rocks for long enough without destroying any, the aliens will eventually start appearing. If you manage to destroy an alien before destroying ANY rocks you'll be granted a trip to a bonus wave (where all you have to do is collect bonus items).

Why Discontinued?

When Hasbro acquired Atari they began a rather heavy-handed campaign to shut down any game that resembled any of the Atari assets they had just acquired, including the original "Asteroids" game. Debris was clearly reminiscent of "Asteroids", and just barely successful enough to have been picked up by their radar, so Hasbro filed suit to halt its distribution. Nevermind that years earlier Atari had failed to win similar cases against games that even more closely resembled "Asteroids" and thus legal precedent had already been established in our favor. But who can afford to fight Hasbro's bankrolled lawyers, whether or not Hasbro had a case? In the end it became a better financial decision to just pull the game and avoid the court costs.

Don't get me wrong - I am a strong supporter of copyrights. However I do not support attempting to use them to obtain near-patent-protection on ideas. Copyright was NOT intended to protect ideas, only specific unique expressions of those ideas. If you were to look at and play the original vector Asteroids then compare it with Debris you will recognize similar ideas, but what you will not find is the same unique expression of those ideas. We were convinced that Hasbro didn't even have a "look and feel" case, let alone a full copyright infringement case. Nevertheless, in the end it was to our financial benefit to accept a settlement wherein the game was pulled and further legal wranglings were avoided.

(Note that the suit was filed based on the original monochrome vector-based Asteroids arcade console game, not the later PC version released by Hasbro under the same name. Debris was released before Hasbro's Asteroids - giving the appearance that Hasbro's suit was merely a strong-armed intimidation tactic designed to "clear the field" of competitors' products before their own product launch. Had we actually gone to court it's likely we could have countersued on anti-competitive grounds.)

Ah well, enough of that, it's all ancient history now!

What's Up With Those Dialog Windows?

This is offered as an apology of sorts to owners of the game. Apologies for not fully completing the user interface and having to rely on Windows dialogs for some portions (where a graphically rendered interface would have "fit" the game better). Some of it was a remnant of the game's Windows 3.1 16-bit past, but mostly it just came down to a matter of available time: I ended up having to do a lot (ok, all) of the in-game artwork myself. Modelling and rendering the ships, rocks, aliens, explosion effects, status displays, et cetera -- all done by the programmer, yours truly, who had plenty of programming left that he should be doing instead. Development had a limited budget and the artist assigned to the project, while an extremely talented artist, (so Terry if you ever read this please take no offense), had a skill set that didn't quite mesh with the game's needs. So, given limited time and budget, it all came down on me, and corners had to be cut somewhere. So, for example, the high score display sucks - I'd just as soon have yanked the whole thing out rather than leave it like it is, but you gotta have high scores, right? Argh. The consolation is that those compromises allowed for all of the in-game work to be completed.