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New Game: BALACHOR'S REVENGE
Balachor is back.. Here it is..! Balachor's Revenge, the sequel to Catacombs of Balachor. By me & Rorthron - our second game.
Downloadable here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5141533/BalachorsRevenge.zip
This one's more of an arcade adventure... Objects to use, people to interact with. The aim is to find Balachor in his lair and work out a way to destroy him once and for all...
Default keys (which you can redefine)
Q - Up
A - Down
O - Left
P - Right
Space - fire (you'll need to pick up a weapon first)
1, 2 and 3 to pick up/drop objects in each of your 3 pockets. Treasure & food gets collected/used automatically when you run into it.
Written in assembly using my emulator of choice, ZX Spin. Music composed with the mighty Beepola.
A big "cheers" to Olli, Pattie & Lone Magpie for the additional art, and also to Mr R-Tape. And of course, Graz for producing a mega-ultra-pack for Monument Microgames:
Treat yourself to a late Christmas pressie and get the real media pack here:
http://www.monumentmicrogames.com/
Downloadable here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5141533/BalachorsRevenge.zip
This one's more of an arcade adventure... Objects to use, people to interact with. The aim is to find Balachor in his lair and work out a way to destroy him once and for all...
Default keys (which you can redefine)
Q - Up
A - Down
O - Left
P - Right
Space - fire (you'll need to pick up a weapon first)
1, 2 and 3 to pick up/drop objects in each of your 3 pockets. Treasure & food gets collected/used automatically when you run into it.
Written in assembly using my emulator of choice, ZX Spin. Music composed with the mighty Beepola.
A big "cheers" to Olli, Pattie & Lone Magpie for the additional art, and also to Mr R-Tape. And of course, Graz for producing a mega-ultra-pack for Monument Microgames:
Treat yourself to a late Christmas pressie and get the real media pack here:
http://www.monumentmicrogames.com/
Post edited by Morkin on
Comments
Looks quite good!
reminds me slightly of Feud and another game I cant remember the name of
(Im sure thats the kind of incisive feedback you were after!)
The bloke sez to look fo r 'erbs in the forest but idunnae see any
Ah - let me check the herbiary...
I am not crazy about the hero grafx to be honest but as far as al the rest go and as far as the game goes i like it a lot!
thanks for that
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1694367894143130/
Out of interest, what would you do differently?
You just need to be carrying them - in any order.
JSpeccy-win32-portable
I loved the game - really did- it's my kinda thing... puzzles which are not illogical... no unfair deaths... pretty tree graphics!
BUT ... there's not really any replay value.. which is a shame.
Sometimes with that sort of thing I reckon just adding an increasing timer would help - just so if you want to play again you can try and beat how quickly you're able to finish it.
Anyway, well done, you kept me playing till the end which most games don't !
A few notes on comments people have made, and some other things.
We tried a load of different sprite animations before anything else (some sprite mock ups are included with the Monument pack if you've bought it). Eventually we settled on a similar style to "Catacombs...", because (a) I'm a bit crap at writing sprite routines(!), and (b) there weren't going to be many open areas in the map, so using diagonal movement seemed a bit unnecessary (you can still hold diagonals to negotiate the map of course). Both Rorthron and I are fans of the early Ultimate games and particular the cartoony graphics in Atic Atac, Sabre Wulf etc. (as you can probably tell). Movement is quick (4 pixel), mainly because you have to cross a lot of screens and I didn't want it to get too tedious moving from screen to screen.
I was wondering if anyone would finish it. I'm an "ability-challenged" gamer so don't like games that are hard, but the map is fairly open and there are lots of objects/puzzles so I thought a few people would get stuck. It does get a bit harder later on but you can kill the monsters in the central town areas if you find yourself traipsing through there a lot (once they're dead they stay dead).
The rating you get at the end (or when you die) is calculated on (a) your score, for solving puzzles and (b) your wealth. We envisaged that you'd have probably have to buy hints to finish the game. It's completable without buying hints, though if you don't buy the most expensive one you'll be doing a bit more searching around... ;-)
I concede that there could definitely be a bit more replay value - we did discuss randomising a load more stuff, but in the end we didn't :grin:. One thing you could aim for is to finish the game with maximum gold (collect all the treasure on the map and don't buy any hints), and thus get the highest wealth rank. I suppose. But I'd happily shake the hand of anyone who completes it once...
I only had a few bytes left at the end (the code is over 40kb). About 80% of the work was fixing bugs and trying to simplify routines to save bytes (I guess this is normal, right?). I'm not a programmer - I started learning Speccy machine code recently (what else would I want to program? ;-)) and this is our 2nd game effort, and I personally had loads of fun making it. And all of Rorthron's graphics were designed in that well-known graphics program - Microsoft Excel..!
Finally, I'd recommend anyone who tried unsuccessfully to learn machine code back-in-the-day (TM) and is wondering whether to have a go at it now, to go for it - it takes a bit of time to get started but once you've got one controllable sprite moving around you're 90% of the way there. Then you can finally write that game you designed 30-odd years ago. It's also a lot easier as you don't have to reload your game from tape when your code crashes. Also you can write sloppy code and nobody will every know (or care).. :lol:
This is probably fair. To some extent it is inevitable with the style of game: once you have solved the puzzles, they stay solved. We did try to build in some replay value, though. As you will probably already have noticed, there is some variation in the puzzles from game to game. And, as Morkin mentioned, you can replay the game and try to get a higher finishing rank. But the truth is that there wasn't memory left to add much else, even after text compression, code optimisation, etc. We squeezed everything we could into the game to start with.
Put some speedy foe who steals your items, you'll have to find him and recover them with arcade weapons.
Your items can be destroyed, in which case you'd have to build substitutes out of bits of other objects like shingles, window glass, etc
Besides money, collect ointment and give it to the mad wizard so that his secrets change from lunatic riddles to clear instructions. Lots of funny texts could be used this way.
JSpeccy-win32-portable
:lol:
That's a cool idea...
Bravo! Great going.
Serf? Serf?!! What kind of rank do you call that? You can do better than that. ;)
Nice work..!
Oh, is 1925 the most wealth you can amass?
I see the runes are different every time. That was a shock! Haha. :lol:
Well done..! Yep, I think that's the ultimate win.. Must have taken a bit of time to get the right runes.. ;)
I could quite easily sit down and run through it again. The speed of the character means you can get places quickly, if he was slower I think it would be slightly tedious? The puzzles aren't that hard & you've got that bloke who helps out for dosh anyway. All in all a great game. Hats off to you both, really enjoyed it... And will again if I can get my hands on the ultimate tape version. :D
Now that's a rank. Well done.