| The title of the first and only videogame I made, back in high school. Not knowing any programming language, and seeing the success of Myst, I got down to work with Hypercard. The thing is, I absolutely wanted this game to be a first-person shooter, which is kind of an odd thing to do with Hypercard. However, including graphics and sound was really easy and even if I never finished the game, it was a lot of fun to play.
The opening screen was a badly mouse-drawn picture of a countryside landscape with a cute rabbit near a flower. The word 'Carnage' was printed in pink cursive letters on the blue sky, under a radiant sun. A cute piano tune was being played until the player clicked the mouse; then the screen would change to a close-up view of a gatling gun surrounded with lightnings, and an AC/DC song would play. After a short introduction in which two narrators would simultaneously tell two different stories, the player would then enter a giant mecha and go intrude an enemy base.
When playing, the interface was rather simple but quite appropriate: a Mindscape-like (see Deja-Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate, etc.) navigation system was used for displacements, a 'screen' zone would show the outside of the mecha, a text field would present advices from the on-board computer (which was really a bully, always advocating brute force), and two buttons. The first was a 'scan' button, which when pressed would show additionnal information about the environment outside the mecha; the second was a 'fire' button.
Upon pressing the fire button, the screen zone would turn black and the text field would says 'shield up during gun operation'. The player would then hear an incredible gunning sound which I made with my own mouth, and the black screen would then usually reveal a completely destroyed (and quite often blood-painted) room. What a nifty trick!
For each room, there was two looks possible, shiny new and totally wrecked, and global variables would keep track of the state of each room when entering them. When navigating through the ennemy base, the mecha would make three loud thumps, directly taken from the exoskeleton scene at the end of Aliens: the Return.
There was an infinite amount of ammo, and as I said before, the player was encouraged to use it all. The player would die if he did not press the fire button soon enough when there was enemies. However, always pressing fire as the on-board computer suggested would often result in death too, since essential actions involving thought were required, too, such as taking the transparent red plastic strip to read a top secret document with red stripes all over it.
God this game was great. I wanted the final screen to picture the rabbit in the opening screen, with fierce looking eyes, eating the flower. Sometimes I wish I was I game designer instead of a boring engineer. | 
