The Original game:
Screenshots from Remake (pictures
reduced in size).
CONTROLS
Start the game with the ENTER key.
Leave the game and return to the menu with the ESC jey.
Exit the game and return to Windows using the F12 key.
Use O & P to go left and right and SPACE to jump.
You can also use the LEFT, RIGHT and UP arrows.
Use H to pause the game during play.
Press H again to continue.
If you, for some reason, don't like the castle backdrop in the game, you can press
1,2 or 3 on the 'about' screen, to change between the castle
backdrop, a tiled background and an entirely black retro'ish background.
COMPARISON BETWEEN REMAKE AND ORIGINAL
All the screens, 23 in all, are generated using the original data from
the
Spectrum version - the same goes for positions of items, ladders, monsters &
so forth. All positional data are then converted into something more useable
on the run. The remake is not completely identical to the original though.
I do think that the gameplay is spot on, but some things are different though.
Having only played 5 or 6 screens from the original game throughout the
development
period of the remake, I was a bit surprised to see that on some screens you
turn into a bird, and I had completely forgotten about that. This is something
I only realized during playtesting during the last few days before the deadline.
By then it was too late to implement "bird mode", so you will always take the
form of Sir Lancelot himself.
Furthermore, the original sprites would fit into a 16*16 pixel square, so I
designed my sprites to fit into a 40*40 pixel square, but the original sprites
were mostly much smaller than the 16*16 pixels allowed whereas mine are more
close
to fill out those 40*40 pixels. That means that generally my sprites are a bit
larger
than the original ones and therefore I had to change some things during
playtesting
to make it possible to complete the game, because the original game was
finetuned
to work with sprites that were slightly smaller than mine.
So on one screen I added a ladder, shortened a ladder on another screen, slowed
down a few sprites, changed a lot of sprites into the 'snake' sprite because
it's the smallest one and easiest to jump over, and finally widened some gaps
in the level design here and there. I also changed to time allowed to finish
each
screen from 1000 to 1500. None of these adjustments changes the gameplay though.
CHEATMODE
I have successfully played through the whole game, so it can be finished,
but just in case you're having trouble I've included a cheatmode
I'm not gonna tell what it is though, but it involves pressing 3
keys simultaneously, on the mainmenu.
COMPUTER REQUIREMENTS
The game is developed on a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 and tested on 4 different
computers
with those general specs, and it seems to run just fine on those computers.
The smallest computer I've tried the game on is an IBM 350MHz Pentium 2 with a
Geforce 2 PCI graphics card and it runs just fine on this computer. Slightly
slower
than on the Pentium 4, but perfectly smoothly. It also runs OK on my work
computer
which is a 1GHz Pentium 3 laptop - still very playable although slightly choppy,
but for some reason not as smoothly as on the Pentium 2. Must be the graphics
card.
LEGAL BLURB
The game is, according to rules of the Remakes Competition 2004,
FREEWARE and
must remain freeware and can generally be distributed however you want, as long
as all the files, including this one, are present and have their original names.
I would like to ask though, that if you use this game on a CD for a magazine or
somewhere else, that you contact me first - I would like to know what kind
places
my little project goes...also it shouldn't be asking too much, but I would also
like a copy of the magazine, CD or whatever. It's not a requirement though.
COPYRIGHT
The original game was programmed for the Spectrum by Stephen Cargill in
1984 and
released by Melbourne House.
This remake is programmed entirely by me, S. Borgquist - aka. Sokurah, in 2004.
The resources used in the game are a mixed bag - some are entirely by me and
some
are based on stuff I've found on the Internet, because unfortunately I didn't
really
have time to give the graphics the attention that they required. I'm very
satisfied
with the mainsprite though, which I put a lot of effort into, and I'm also
pretty
happy with the speech in the game, which is all me... I had a lot of fun
recording it.
Any updates to this game or when I (hopefully) finish some more games
(and I have plenty of ideas), will be available for download at
http://tardis.dk
Thanks for reading this.
VERSION CONTROL
V1.0 - Initial release
v1.1 - Updated Juli 15th, 2007
The game was too hard, so time has been upped from 1500 to 2000. Lives increased
from 3 to 4.
One screen removed and at least 15 screens tweaked to be easier.