Fact: indie game developers enjoy games so much that they will try to put games anywhere, even where they “don’t belong” (which, of course, is nowhere). Case in point, apparently there’s been some headway made in putting games on the most corporate of software environments, the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
I guess it really began with Microsoft itself, whose wily programmer’s embedded a 3d “game” into Excel ’95 called The Hall of Tortured Souls. Although technically not made with Excel itself, it may have planted the seeds that have since sprouted into the Excel game development community as we know it today. It also gets bonus points for helping prove that Bill Gates is really the Anti-Christ.
Gamasutra put out a feature a couple months ago that touts Excel as “the next revolutionary 3d engine,” and makes a compelling case for it. The article highlights Excel’s arithmetical facilities, rendering environments, and non-traditional approaches to source code and debugging. Here it is in action:
But yes, leave it to the Japanese to start putting some actual games on this unconventional platform. Chikada’s VBA Action Game website has dozens of Excel games – everything from arcade remakes to shoot ’em ups to dungeon crawlers to fighting games. The menu at the top of the site lets you browse the collection by genre.
(Note: You will have to let macros run freely in Excel to play most of these games. A lot of them didn’t work for me, either.)
DEX-EV (pictured at the top of this post) is one of the more impressive shoot ‘em ups on Chikada’s site. And Shadow Slash, the creator, is a prominent Excel developer who keeps a series of 73 Excel game development articles on his blog. If you can read Japanese, check it out. There are also two Japanese books (one and two) on game development using VBA, the Visual-Basic based macro programming language included with Excel.
Next up: a heart-warming story about a man who put DOOM on his grandpa’s pacemaker and prevented a heart attack by killing the Cyberdemon.
(Sources: Brandon, via Insert Credit, and the2bears)