Earthraid
"Earthraid" is available from my homepage now.
This is a conversion of a C64 game.
Instruction is build in.
Post edited by LCD on
"Earthraid" is available from my homepage now.
This is a conversion of a C64 game.
Instruction is build in.
Comments
My best score is 1588 (only on level 1!). Part of it depends on having a little bit of luck with how the landscape gets generated.
Thank you!
The original C64 game was german only, so I do not wonder that many people never heard about it, but in german C64 forum some users nominated it to their all time favourites.
The difference between levels is that the mollusks live longer (10 rounds on level 1, 12 on level 2 and so on), also the waiting time for a missile is defined equaly. On higher levels also less water is generated, making it harder to get good scores.
My best score was around 2100, but only with much luck, but I had many many tries while writing this game.
Was sure a pretty hard fight... ;)
Thanks for the nice words. You are better from time to time...
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0027687
One of the best loading screens on the speccy i have seen. 8) awsome!
Thanks... reading this from you is a honor for me.
Try to use mines and poison (on aged mollusks, this will kill them instantly), and if you get them, also the missiles. Our fate is in your hands!
There's one problem, though. The aforementioned randomised maps mean that how threatening the molluscs are can be arbitrary. In one of my games I started with two of the three mollusc "landings" on islands or peninsulas which were easy to isolate meaning I got a whopping great score. In the previous game the map was one large landmass with little water meaning that containing the aliens was extremely difficult and I largely ended-up pulling the civilians out with helicopters. It'd be nice for islands/peninsulas to be more common on low difficulty and rare on the higher levels.
Ah, you've implemented something similar to what I mentioned already, that's good :). Only thing is the "difficult" stage I got was on level 1 whilst the really easy one was level 2. I'm not sure how practical it would be to make things less arbitrary, though.
I was thinking about this, but the original C64 version had no pass function too, and I wanted to do a perfect matched copy in terms of playbility.
In this case you can use poison on already dead molluscs as this has no effect on the score, if you do not hit normal landscape.
Same here. Playing version 1.1 but half the world always ends up being eaten / decimated / poisoned.
Great game. As always, I wanna see more, and I'd LOVE it, if there could be some larger animated sprites of molluscs eating the land-mass / poisoned land / dead molluscs, etc, as you move your cursor over them. There are a few war-games that do something similar. Yep, I'd loike to see that.... but I still love it as it is.
Believe me, the original C64 version was not easier, maybe even harder becaues it was german only.
I wanted to write this game since 1987, and finaly did it, but maybe it will be interesting for you that I also planed a follow-up called "It came from outer space" with Molluscs that can have special abilitys (Mutants!), better graphics, larger map and such stuff. I published a very very early screenshot on my homepage (there was just scrolling finished). Found some notices again. It is a candidate for recoding. As it will be no conversion job anymore, I can design it at my will.
But some other projects has to be finished first...
Ooh yeah, that sounds smart, especially if it's a scrolling play area.
Very interested in your future projects. In the meantime, this'll keep me busy for a while. Thanks. :)
Ah thanks, I hadn't realised that poison could be used on dead molluscs. Serves me right for not reading the instructions properly!
Reading instruction for some of my games is important, and if I still have much free memory, I will include it in my games. But most games can be played without reading it.
Manga Girlz Challenge? That'll be another one you get praise from the Mojons for ;)
Well, actually it had: The <Cursor Left> key (with auto-repeat even).
But that was a totally undocumented feature, and, to be honest, just a bug that had escaped my attention...
Great job, LCD!
I'm Dirk, who wrote the original version - what is it now? 26 years ago? My...
And I'm chuffed to pieces that you really undertook all the efforts to recreate my game on an entirely different platform from scratch. :)
I've still got the source code somewhere (6510 assembler, of course, which is rarely seen here in speccy land, I presume). It never had seen the light of the day before (except for the editorial office of Happy Computer back in 1986). If you like, I can try to dig it out and send it to you. Might be interesting in hind-sight for you. Well, maybe not...
Absolutely awesome loading-screen, btw.
Oh, but you seem to have a bit too much water and islands in the landscapes... ;)
Please do!
I for one would love to see that!
:smile:
Cool! Earthraid was one of my favorite games on C64 in the early years. I spent ages to type it in, but it was worth all the efforts. Thank you. I wanted to keep it in the spirit of original game (but the Spectrum has no character display, Sprites and SID). I even wanted to include the scrolling water. Not a easy task on a bitmap-display and in compiled BASIC. I used a assembler routine to put the bytes on screen, but anything else was compiled BASIC (Boriels ZXBC Cross-compiler)
The only improvement was to add a missile graphics.
I noticed how many Spectrum games are ported to Atari XL, and wanted to do a conversion from C64 to Spectrum, and Earthraid was only known in germany because all texts are german. Thats true. I never coded in 6510 assembly, but know some coders who can. Here in Vienna I often visit the Commodore-Stammtisch and the people told me that you are still active. Surely not just only for me! Thank you. Not in the higher levels of play. I think, that look so because Spectrum map has only 32x22 tiles, while on C64 there are 40x22. I also modified the scoring from 3 to 4 for each gras/tree tile to get similar scores as in the C64 version.
The water generation uses the same "grow" routine as the mollusks, but I was never sure how many rounds of growing is allowed for each level.
Cool!
I have currently some other projects in making ("Looped", "Manga Girlz Challenge", "Yomiko in the Haunted mansion", "Journey's End II" to name some), but also the first routines for the sequel are already working, like the delta-scrolling of landscape.
I still cannot believe, you found my game!
Maybe the next legend that will appear is Matthew Prescott, the author of "Journey's end" ;).