Overview of current projects.
I don’t post nearly enough but I thought I’d make a post about what open projects I have going on – just so you know I’m not watching TV all the time. 
If you look in the menu above there are three titles – Psycho Pigs UXB, X-Quest 2 & Horace in the Mystic Woods, but I have two more titles I haven’t written about yet.
* Star Castle. This is a classic vector graphics game and it’s nearly done. Actually I could probably upload it as it is, but I’m not quite satisfied with it yet so I’ll work on it a little longer. Visually it’ll look like Omega Race 2009 and you can click >here< to see a preview of the menuscreen.
So, Star Castle should’ve been done now, but “unfortunately” I’ve been distracted (again…as usual 
) by a new project which I started about a week ago. A new competition over at Retro Remakes to make a PBeM game (Play-By-Email) caught my attention and I thought it could be a fun project to work on.
* ALIEN. I’ve always liked Laser Squad and I originally wanted to remake that for the PBeM competition but I realized it was probably a bit too much to try to remake that in two months. Instead I decided to remake the ZX Spectrum game, Alien – which is a singleplayer game, as a multiplayer game and I think it’s going to work. It’s still early days so there’s not screenshots yet.
When I have something interresting to show I’ll post it in my thread on the Retro Remakes forum >here<.
The game will allow up to 5 human players to play against each other. Well, up to 3 player can play humans and 2 players can play the aliens, so it makes sense to play humans against aliens. The game is set on the Nostromo and will play like a Lite version of Laser Squad. The competition will run for another two months and end on april 1st. so hopefully I can finish this one and get on with Star Castle and then those pesky piggies.
WIP: Horace in the Mystic Woods
I was just going to work quietly on this and release it when it was done, but now I decided otherwise.
Like most other people I didn’t know this game existed until an article in Retro Gamer Magazine almost 2 years ago, but I do love a good platform game and this one looked fabulous. Unfortunately this game was only available on a pretty obscure platform – the Psion 3.
- Level 1 from the original Psion 3 game
Without a ROM or an emulator to run it on I quickly turned to Ebay and a couple of months later I bought the game cartridge and 2 Psion’s (because 1 apparently wasn’t enough).
I fell in love with the game in no time – one might say “obsessed” and I quickly completed all 64 levels.
I decided I wanted to remake it. It fit the category of games I like to remake perfectly – it’s obscure, and I wanted to do another platformer, so 1½ year ago I began programming it but after a while I shelved it again. I wasn’t satisfied with the my results – especially the movement of Horace and that’s crucial since I’d like the remake to be as close to the original game as possible.
One year later, in january of this year, I got in contact with the programmer of the original game and asked if it was okay if I made a remake of it. It was and now I had the original files so I started to decode the original levelformat. Not too long after that, I mailed him an early demo of the game, and…he loved it.
Currently it’s progressing slowly because my main focus is getting Psycho Pigs UXB finished (and before that I was working on Omega Race 2009).Still, once in a while when I want to look at something else than pigs I’ll take it out and work on it for a few days, before returning to the piggies again, but when I’m done with the oinkers I’ll shift my focus completely to Horace and complete that project.
Here’s a screenshot of the remake of Horace in the Mystic Woods as it looks now.
- Screenshot of level 1 in the remake (without control panel)
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Come back soon…