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Tunnel Panic ST 2026
Tunnel Panic is a very simple game. Just stay alive by dodging obstacles and walls while your ship careens through the horizontally scrolling tunnels. The tunnels that get successively narrower and filled with more objects, and your ship speeds up on each new level. It’s a score chaser game.
The joystick button is the only control. Press it and your ship moves up. It’s as simple as that. Pick up the yellow miner for a bonus.
Development and Credits
Tunnel Panic was originally created for a book that my brother Steve and I authored in 2009 / 2010 called “The Essential Guide to Flash Games”. The title is terrible and we didn’t have any control over it, but it was an advanced programming book containing everything I had learned about game development and object oriented programming up to that point in my career.
Tunnel Panic is a simple game, but that's the point. In our book we describe how you have to make games to get better at making games. I have made 50 Atari ST game demos and projects but have not finished any in the last 20 years. So, this is the first finished one. Our “second game theory” in the book states basically that your first game will most likely suck, and that’s OK. Get it to a playable, mostly bug free state and flex your muscles by moving on to the next game.
Tunnel Panic was built with STOS, The Missing Link for STOS, and the VS Code STOS Plugin from stoscoders.com. I had to Modify the plug-in to work in Linux Borne shell properly. I wanted SPEED in this game and it had to run at 30 FPS, so I chose single color vector style graphics rendered on one bit plane using the Missing Link Joey commands.
The music and sound effects were created in the STOS Music definer, which is more of an odd duck than I thought it would be. I intended for the in-game music to speed up and change pitch on each successive level, but while that code is in the game, I don’t think it is working. (on to the next game)
The graphics, title, and 16x16 icon font were also created by me directly on the ST. The font was created in the STOS Icon definer and the title screen in Degas Elite.
The source code and the Linux modified VS Code Plugin starter project are available upon request.
Jeff D. Fulton
April 2026.
jeffdfulton@gmail.com
https://www.intotheverticalblank.com
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