C-Dogs

• Title — C-Dogs • Modes — Single-player, multiplayer • Genre — Shoot 'em up • Released — 1997 • Platforms — MS-DOS

• Illustration — Gameplay screenshot In C-Dogs, players play through a number of campaigns made of a variable number of missions. Each mission has a selection of weapons and different objectives, such as killing enemies, collecting items, destroying objects, or rescuing a hostages. The campaigns can be played by a single player or with one cooperative player. Other features include color-coded keys to access locked rooms, friendly characters, and neutral civilians that penalize the players if attacked. C-Dogs also includes a 2-player, split-screen deathmatch mode called "dogfight": players attempt to kill each other for a fixed number of rounds, and the player winning the most rounds wins. Players can be controlled by keyboard, joysticks or gamepads. Compared to Cyberdogs, C-Dogs includes the following enhancements: • Multiple campaigns - 5 included, with user-created missions available for download online. Missions also include short story-driven briefings. • Different level layouts • Deathmatch mode • More NPC types: friendlies that attack enemies, hostages, and neutral civilians • Custom campaign editor • More weapons, including different types of grenades The feature to buy and sell weapons and ammo between levels was removed.

The creator of C-Dogs, Ronny Wester, released the precursor to C-Dogs, Cyberdogs, in 1994. The popularity of Cyberdogs and the limitations of its 16-bit protected mode motivated Wester to write a sequel, which was released between the years 1997 to 2001 as freeware.

In 2000 Wester released the Borland Pascal 7 source code of Cyberdogs (minus some libraries he had licensed) on his website. In 2002, Wester released the source code of C-Dogs to the public. As of June 2007, Wester no longer maintains a website for C-Dogs but the game continues to live on via the C-Dogs SDL project hosted on GitHub. In April 2016, Wester released the game assets as CC-BY.

Following the source code release in 2002, Jeremy Chin and Lucas Martin-King ported the game to SDL and released their work under the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later as C-Dogs SDL. The open source software port contains a number of enhancements to the original C-Dogs, including high-resolution support, local multiplayer up to four players, enhanced graphics and LAN multiplayer. In October 2015, C-Dogs SDL was updated to SDL2. Version 1.0.0 released on August 21, 2021, with support for Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny missions.

With the source code availability and the initial SDL port, the game was ported later for many platforms: Android, GCW Zero, GP2X, Dingoo, PlayStation Portable, Dreamcast, Nintendo DS, Wii, Amiga OS, UIQ3 devices such as SE M600, P1i, P990, and Motorola RIZR Z8.