Spectrum Computing

Happy new year, people!

I've a pleasure to announce my new game. I made promises about it before but now it's ready.

I have already sent it already to Zx Dev Conversions Compo. You can see it here:
http://zx-dev-conversions.proboards.com ... underwaffe

Some info copy-pasted from that ZX Dev Conversions page:

The game is called Wunderwaffe which is "wonder weapon" in German. You are and Allied undercover agent, disguised as Nazi officer. Your job is to get into Nazi underground base and recover secret documents.




Disclaimer for dummies

- you are not a Nazi, you are disguised as a Nazi. Nazis are bad guys, you kill them
- if your law, religion, morality or stepmother forbids you to play game with Nazi symbols just don't play it and don't moan

The game is inspired by Polish game for Atari 8-bit computer called Hans Kloss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl8f5oEETzU

Hans Kloss was a hero of Polish TV series from the 60s called "Stawka Większa niż Życie" - something like "More Than Life at Stake" in English
www.imdb.com/title/tt0065035/?ref_=nv_sr_1
It was very popular in Poland and this popularity survived into 90s when some young guys made a game about it on Atari, totally without any copyrights dealt with;) The Atari game is very loosely tied to the film, it's actually completely new story, connected just by the hero.

So my game is loosely inspired by Atari game which is loosely inspired by the film I added shooting soldiers, more detailed backgrounds and lots of other stuff but the main ideas are the same - explore Nazi base, travel by lifts, collect keys, food and documents.

The download (game with instruction):
www.sendspace.com/file/61lhch

Admins: this game belongs yet to the year 2017

Nice one Ralf.

Hope it's okay if I give an alternative download link until we get it one the site (there'll be a few delays early Jan).

Download (not sendspace).

This is excellent. I don't know if you'll win the comp but it's a contender.

I like your graphical style but Hans looks like a burns victim in the loading screen. If you have any energy left for the project that's one thing I'd change.

Bug report - it's only happened once out of ~6 games but after losing all energy on restart you just keep falling.

Here's a snapshot (ZXSPIN 0.666 128 mode)

Good job, Rafal!

Quite difficult game but i enjoy it.

R-Tape wrote: ↑Mon Jan 01, 2018 4:13 pm This is excellent. I don't know if you'll win the comp but it's a contender.

I like your graphical style but Hans looks like a burns victim in the loading screen. If you have any energy left for the project that's one thing I'd change.

I would echo the comment about the loading screen character, the screen has a strong light source coming from the right which is reflected in the Hat and Uniform but not in the face. He would look better with more shadowing on the face if you could.

Looks interesting! I'll give it a try later.

Good job Ralf - this "wonder weapon" of yours would have been worth of a commercial release back in the day. Reminds me of the final stage of Army Moves. I believe it could have been better if you could have had more than just one life at your disposal however.

Best of luck for the competition, I was thinking about joining it but then I was absorbed by other things... well next year maybe

Nice. Apart from the whole moonbase floaty feel, which I'm not too sure about, there's actually a decent and thought-out game to it, with a combat system that leans more towards a strategic/positioning type puzzler. Got to the lower-floor 'mine railway' yesterday, will definitely try again more.

Spoiler

I've also experienced the infinite-rising bug described previously by R-Tape. I think this might be the result of dying on the lift while moving up-down. Also, sometimes your guy seems to jump in the wrong direction diagonally if you try it from the standing position, although this might just be my phone.

Happy Douglas-Adams-reference-day, btw.

Thanks for the nice words!

The loading screen, as some of you may guess, is converted and heavily retouched photo. There certainly was some dark area on the face in the original and it had its meaning but I could have lost some subtle game of shadows during my converting/retouching

I believed the game isn't so hard but maybe it's me playing it for many hours while testing. It's definitely about learning some patterns. So if you find it hard, play it with snapshots. Just play it, it will be nice for me that someone enjoys it this or other way

It's also not so big. You can complete it in less than half an hour. It's 49 screens, 7 floors of 7 rooms each. Bottom two floors are graphically different - see if you can reach them. They are supposed to be very modern, recent addition to the base.

I may try to fight with bugs later but currently I need some rest with this game

Completed, but cheated. I enjoyed it a lot, and think of this as training for a proper attempt on real hardware.

POKEs:

Spoiler

40751,x life
40752,x bullets
40754,255 loads of time

And for the really lazy:

Spoiler

44250,0 object immunity, but not bullet immunity

Oh and:

Spoiler

CHANGE THE LOADING SCREEN!! :-p

Has anyone considered the protagonist may actually be a burns victim?

I did! (But there's no mention of it in the film Ralf describes.)

Edit - I've removed my screen & will talk to Ralf privately to see if he's interested.

Sorry Ralf - it's a superb game with the best AY I've heard in ages, hope you don't think I'm taking the P?s?

Just played it and I love it. The only problem is its high difficulty level. Hard to pass 3-4 screens!

Made it! - No cheating ofc. :p A bit tricky and some memorization required (there are a few insta-kill spots, sometimes depending on which direction you came from) but definitely doable.

Spoiler

Also, I've confirmed the diagonal jump direction bug, this seems to happen when both directions are pressed at exactly the same time. It doesn't seem to happen if you first hold a direction and then press the jump key.

Great looking game Ralf!

Nice work! It is a challenging game but I like that. Looks good also. Very professional feel to it.

How long did it take you to write? If you have time it would be nice to find out more about the making of the game - like a behind the scenes type thing.

You plan to make a sequel?

How long did it take you to write? If you have time it would be nice to find out more about the making of the game - like a behind the scenes type thing.

Actually it a really difficult question for me

Honestly I don't know how much time I spent on it. I didn't count it. I don't use version control system which would probably gave me such info. Now I wondered and maybe I just don't want to know, so I didn't feel guilty about "wasting" so much time on a hobby

Actually I didn't start from scratch. This game uses a slightly modified engine from my earlier game - Janosik. And Janosik used code and tools like location editor from even earlier games. So there is quite a lot of copy/paste in my games. Doesn't it count into total game development time or not?

It's my old game that I started many time ago, around 2013-2014. But I worked with different pace. There were weeks when I worked each evening and months (a lot) when I did nothing.

You plan to make a sequel?

At this moment no. I said it before on forums but will repeat it here - my style of working is starting several projects and working on all of them at at he same time. This way I try to avoid boredom. But there is a side effect - when motivation crisis strikes you, you have 5 unfinished games at early stage and not 1 on advanced stage so there is a serious risk that you'll never finish them.

At this moment I'm quite happy to complete this game and well... will be trying to complete my other games, with complete different story