Update 2020 #1: I’m still alive :-)

Wow, today it’s precisely two years since my last update. Not much new to report, though – I haven’t been terribly active lately … hence the absence of updates. In those two years I’ve started coding 3 games for the Spectrum Next … and abandoned all of them again. It appears I’m lacking the motivation to code at the moment. Oh well. I guess I just need a bit of time away from it, so unfortunately I’m not writing about a new game, but rather updates on a few older projects.

The 48K version of Vallation came out in 2016 and the 128K version about 1.5 year later. The 128K version was intended to be exclusive to the physical release of the game by Psytronic, but I always wanted to make it a free download too, after a while. Well, that’s now. I’ve added a download link to its page, here. Get the physical version on tape anyway, if you don’t have it 😉

More good news: My webhost was sold a while back (a year ago, perhaps two?) and changed name in the process. That also meant that the servernames changed, which resulted in the online scoring in my games broke. It took me a while to look into, but luckily I had coded the highscore functions rather cleverly, so all I had to do was change the server scripts. Which I’ve done now and the online scoring should work again.

However, there is also some bad news. I’m usually a Windows user, but I bought a MacBookPro in 2011 to be able to port some of my games to OSX. However, some time later Apple updated OSX and dropped legacy support, which means that my OSX games doesn’t work on newer versions of OSX. The language I coded the games in hasn’t been updated, so unfortunately it’s not possible to recompile them anymore. I will leave the games online, but be aware that they won’t work on the current versions of OSX.

Alright, that was it for my 2020 update. Let’s hope I find a project to work on, so it doesn’t take two years before the next update 😉

SQIJ 2018 now out on cassette tape.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any news, but I’m now happy to announce that my latest ZX Spectrum game is out on cassette. I just received my own copy a little while back. Here’s a picture (click to enlarge).

It’s available from Psytronik Software here and the price is only £6.99 + p/p.

Hurry and get yourself a piece of (revised) Spectrum history 😉 🙂

New Spectrum game: SQIJ 2018.

My first release of 2018 is a funny one – basically it’s a remake of one of the very worst games for the ZX Spectrum. Or more precisely: this game is a remake of the original C64 game that unfortunately only received such a truly atrocious Spectrum version back in the day.

But here’s a new version that’s almost identical to the original C64 version – same map and item placements … and most importantly – unlike the official Spectrum version from 1987 this one is actually playable.

Go here to download the game, read all about the game follow the interesting links to its story.

You can also buy it on cassette here. The price is a mere £6.99 + p/p

Vallation updated – now at version 1.1

There were a couple of bugs in the game – they were rare…but they were there and not long after the release of version 1.0 I received many messages about those bugs. Nothing like gamers to break you game, right? 😉 😀

However, after a lot of debugging and even more testing I’m fairly confident that the bugs are gone now …but I’m sure time will tell if I’m right. 😉

The link on the page has been updated. Download version 1.1 here.

I’ve only changed code in this update – not the layout of any screens or enemies. That being said – some screens could use a bit of tweaking…like the one below. I guess that despite my thorough testing it never occurred to me to enter this screen from above. If I had I would’ve known that it would most likely be the last thing you did. I’d be impressed if anyone can pass there.

You’d better come in from the bottom or you will NOT make it.

Good news though. We have found someone to distribute the game on physical cassette and we have decided to put the “normal game” (this one) on side A of the tape, but I’ll start working on an extended 128K version for the B-side, with more levels, more graphics, more enemies and some major changes to the gameplay, so I will go through all the levels (again) and make extra sure there aren’t any (almost?) impossible screens like this. More news about this in a couple of months or so.