Glypha

What is Glypha?

Glypha is a Joust-like game by john 'Scheherazade' calhoun.

Glypha.

I love the game, and so I've devoted this little corner of my website to it.

Glypha: The original. Runs in a 512x342 window in the center of the screen, in black-and-white. Amazingly, it still works in Mac OS X — it is truly a testament to the backwards compatibility of the Mac. It is also the most configurable of the Glypha family. The first couple of levels do not have the lava pits; they are opened when you enter level 3.
Glypha II: The sequel is basically the same as the original Glypha, but graphics are 16-color at 640x480. As a result of the added screen space, the score and lives totals are now displayed all the time (in addition to a new level counter), rather than only between levels.
Glypha III: 256-color in a 640x480 window. It is markedly different from the first two Glyphas; the lava pits are open all the time, and the physics are much more realistic. The graphics are prettier, too, of course. The Hand moved to the other side, you get three lives instead of five, and the arrangements of platforms changed. There is a Mac OS X Glypha III porting project underway.
Glypha IV: Glypha IV using full-screen (256-color, 640x480) DrawSprocket video. Also adds pixel shatters (explosions) and score floaters. Otherwise the same as Glypha III.

My involvement

The source code to Glypha III and IV is available, so naturally (in my hacker spirit) I've made some improvements to it.

I've made improvements to Glypha III; most importantly, stereo panning sound. Eventually I hope to submit my changes to the project.
I'm working on porting Glypha IV to Mac OS X. It currently runs in windowed mode only, whereas the original ran in full-screen mode only. I plan to add a switch command. (UPDATE 2008-05-09: Actually, I haven't worked on this in almost two years now. The builds below still work, but my work on this is on hold. At some point, I'll put up a Mercurial repository so that you can help.)

Downloads

I'm archiving all games of the Glypha series that I can find. All the Glypha and Glypha II archives are for Mac OS; all Glypha IIIs and IVs are for Mac OS X unless otherwise identified.

Also, none of these are Universal Binaries. It would probably be quite hard to convert any of these to run on the Intel architecture. Feel free to have a swing at it, though.

Glypha 3.0
Glypha 3.0 (Pascal source code) (contributed by Steve White)
Glypha II 1.0
Glypha II 1.1
Glypha II 1.1 (Pascal source code) (contributed by Steve White)
Glypha III 1.0.1 (English Mac OS version)
Glypha III 1.0.2 (English Mac OS version) (original source of the file)
Glypha III 1.0.2 (C source code for the English Mac OS version, compressed with StuffIt) (original source of the file)
Glypha III 1.0.2 (C source code for the English Mac OS version, compressed with Compact Pro) (original source of the file)
Glypha III 1.1.1 (Japanese Mac OS version) 1.32 MB (original source of the file)
Glypha IV for Mac OS X, 2004-08-13 build

I also have a collection of Glypha screenshots.

Stella Obscura

John Calhoun also made a game called Stella Obscura. I haven't played it, so I don't know how it works as a game (though I did find this very basic gameplay description). Steve White kindly provided me with the source code to Stella Obscura, along with some Glypha source code which I listed above (thanks!). But I don't have a released version of it, so you'll have to figure out compiling and running it on your own, though.

Other Glyphas