Tuesday 4th July 2009
Don't panic. Darkness has not arisen. Friday last week, I had received another C64 game by Anthony Burns (Created using the Sideways SEUCK) called "Baphomet". The game was deeply inspired by some art by H.R.Giger and also the book "At the Mountains of Madness", by novelist H.P.Lovercraft. Anthony made a few H.P.Lovercraft games in the past, two of which were The Call of Cthulhu and also The Dunwich Horror. I was very happy to add music on to this game as well. But I wont be talking about my activities on this game, just some general information about how this game was made.
Anthony has been working really hard on this game. I am not too sure how long it has taken him to make a game like this, but I was well impressed with the in game graphics. The game starts with the usual SEUCK style title screen (or front end or intro as we all like to call it) with some instructions on what to do to play the game (I done a note file on the disk as well) and the game starts of where you should stand by and not do anything. If you move your player, you will end up crashing into the background which is deadly and die. I did something silly once by starting the game with a joystick in port 1, where the player just could not move - how silly was that eh?.
The game is split into 2 parts. The first part is where you are on foot, fighting against enemy guards and also having to smash some of the cannons (except for the flame throwers). The player could collect the spinning star emblems to boost up their score. The major drawback to this mission is that when the player touches any part of the background, they will die. The background is very deadly, which can be tough for the gamer, but it is a good idea anyhow. When the player goes on to the top part of the screen. It wont be able to move any further than about an eighth of the screen at the top (If I have calculated this correctly that is) . The player has to face two different boss enemies. The first of which are some heads shooting bolts. Later on, an evil skull-type of demon. Once past that stage it is then time to switch the joystick port over to port 1 (as prompted by the message).
Joystick port 1 controls the flying character, who has to fight against various enemies. Instead of this part being a push scroll, it is a continuous scrolling game so there is no need to try and push yourself across the screen. There are enemies that will self-destruct if you can't kill them in time. This is a very clever and probably new idea, which Anthony came up with in SEUCK. At the end of this level, you have to face a big demon, Baphomet and shoot hell out of it :o)
The graphics in this game is well drawn, very nicely detailed. Although it uses the black, white and grey mood. But that does not really matter. The only drawback to this scheme was that the walking player had a *red* score, while the flyer has a *white* score instead. I guess the red score did spoil the theme a bit, but I noticed that with SEUCK or sideways SEUCK, the player's score sprites have always been red if the changable sprite multicolour of the player's object was black. Back to the graphics ... The theme was well detailed and the mood of the game was dark. The theme was based in darkness, and the graphics really suited the theme. What a masterpiece Anthony :o)
This game would have been nicer in SEUCK Redux source, but I did not use it this time, due to the bugs left in the source, which unfortunately crashed the game (I did test the redux version with infinite lives, and not all was working. Player 1 score was black instead of red, the sprite/background collision animation was bugged and also the game crashed somewhere in part 2), but I will release this game on to the friends and contributors page of my web site, as soon as the original, but clean and compressed version is uploaded on to The SEUCK Vault.
Below you can see a video footage preview of Baphomet for the C64. This only features the start of the game. Well, I don't want to give too much away do I?
1 comment:
Thank you for the great write-up. :) I am grateful for the praise and agree with the criticisms, though as for the red score bar, that was sadly unavoidable. My original plan for the background was for it to only be impervious to player one rather than lethal, and to have player one trapped in the scenery at the bottom of the screen during the second half, only that would have looked very strange. On reflection, though, I ought to have included fewer nasty narrow spaces in levels 1 and 2.
I used the self-destructing enemies idea once before, for the molotov cocktails in "Cats". I'm not sure if I invented it, or if there was something similar in one of the SEUCK demo games. Glad you liked it, at any rate. :)
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