DEX A painty-maze game for the 48K/128K Spectrum. By Lee Tonks (C)2011, Cheese Freak Software --------------------------------------------- /==================================================\ | THIS GAME IS *FREE*! Please don't charge for it. | \==================================================/ Instructions ------------ Guide your brush around ten randomly-ordered mazes, colouring them in as you go. Colour them quickly and you'll get a bonus, take too long and a new maze is your only reward. But it's not that easy - there are paint bugs patrolling the corridors and they'll eat your brush if you get too close. Hitting fire scares them away for a few seconds, but it also costs 500 of your precious bonus points. Not enough points left? No more scares. It's not all bad, though - you'll earn an extra brush for every two levels completed. Features -------- Brushes! Bugs! Paint! Points! Ten mazes! Several colour schemes! Retro-arcade-style action! Beepy sound effects! Fancy jingles! High score table! Three difficulty levels! Stuff! Controls -------- Q, A, O and P to move, M or SPACE to fire. Or use your favourite Kempston, Cursor or Sinclair joystick. Loading Instructions -------------------- 48K: Type LOAD "" and ENTER, then press PLAY on the tape. 128K: Select TAPE LOADER from the main menu, then press PLAY on the tape. Note: Tape not included. You'll have to make your own. History ------- I originally started this project back in the early 2000s as an experiment to see if I could produce a decent 1982-style arcade game purely in BASIC. It turns out I could, sort of, but I could never get it up to the kind of speed I wanted so it went abandoned with much of the code done but only a single half-finished maze. Around 2006 I ressurected the project and tried to get it working better using a variety of different Spectrum-based BASIC compilers. This met with some success but ultimately they're fiddly to use and the code required lots of modifications so I lost interest again. Several years later, I read in the WOS forums about boriel's ZX BASIC compiler which was modern-computer-based, fully Speccy BASIC compatible *and* offered a whole bunch of other features. Getting the game up and running using that was very easy and the speed was astonishing (I actually ended up slowing the game down artificially because it was too fast to be playable). Since then I've been coming back to it on and off, polishing a little here, adding a maze there, etc. etc. And here we are. I never thought the game would ever actually be finished, but it is. I hope at least one person enjoys playing it (other than my kids)! :-) Credits and Thanks ------------------ * My son, Jake, for creating one of the levels. It's the one with crazy paths and dead ends. * My daughter, Erin, for saying she liked my tunes even when her fingers were in her ears. * Jose Rodriguez (boriel) for the fantastic ZX BASIC, without which this game would've gone unfinished. * Chris Cowley for Beepola, and Shiru for the PHASER1 music engine. * LCD and the various guys who've helped me out and encouraged me over at the ZX BASIC forums. * Martijn van der Heide for his tireless work on World of Spectrum. * Everyone who's still creating Spectrum games today. You're all brilliant! * And to you, for giving this a chance. Seriously - thanks. Links ----- The ZX BASIC Compiler: http://www.boriel.com/ Beepola: http://freestuff.grok.co.uk/beepola/ World of Spectrum: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ Version History --------------- 1.0, 5th Aug 2011, initial release.