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Phantom Slayer (1982)

Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2018 7:41 am
by Juan F. Ramirez
Phantom Slayer was developed in 1982 by Kenneth Kalish for Dragon 32/64 and TRS-80 Color Computer. It seems a cool game, a pity it wasn't converted to the Spectrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_S ... ideo_game)

[youtube]https://youtu.be/ugb19SeaHOQ[/youtube]

It seems similar to Romik's 3D Monster Chase. As sort of 'scary maze game'. Would it be hard to develop a Spectrum game based on it?

Re: Phantom Slayer (1982)

Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2018 8:00 pm
by Morkin
Reminds me of 3D Monster Maze.

Looks like a fairly simple game. I'm not sure about the random maze generation though..! :o

Always think with this sort of game that it'd be nice to have a 'sidestep' option like more modern 3D dungeon crawlers, but I guess it might be difficult if you want to maintain a joystick control method.

Re: Phantom Slayer (1982)

Posted: Sat Jan 27, 2018 7:52 am
by Nomad
The tricky part would be generating the mazes so they do not leave you with impossible exit conditions to the maze. But any rogue type game is going to have the algorithms needed to solve that. It would just be a case of using that with the maze.

Would need something to step through the maze array and check that there was a bunch of conditional logic met to allow a level to be finalized. The nice thing about that is all the processing heavy lifting is done outside of the main game so the rest of the cpu time can be devoted to the game rendering and other logic after.

Use some beeper sounds, perhaps use attribute swaps for the phantom animation screens to save space. (it looks like there are 3 screens for that animation, so 768 x 3...)
Perhaps a bit more ambitious to have some ay music ditty playing at the start depending on space.

I always wondered how games like that figured out how to render the pseudo 3d spaces, I am assuming its just based on the xy position of the player then rending a portion of the screen.

Re: Phantom Slayer (1982)

Posted: Sat Jan 27, 2018 11:57 am
by Einar Saukas
Nomad wrote: Sat Jan 27, 2018 7:52 amThe tricky part would be generating the mazes so they do not leave you with impossible exit conditions to the maze. But any rogue type game is going to have the algorithms needed to solve that. It would just be a case of using that with the maze.

Would need something to step through the maze array and check that there was a bunch of conditional logic met to allow a level to be finalized.
It's possible to generate a perfect (always solvable) maze using just a few instructions:

http://reptonix.awardspace.co.uk/sincla ... d-maze.htm

Nomad wrote: Sat Jan 27, 2018 7:52 amI always wondered how games like that figured out how to render the pseudo 3d spaces, I am assuming its just based on the xy position of the player then rending a portion of the screen.
It also can be implemented with just a few instructions.

This entire 3D maze game, implemented in a single line of Sinclair BASIC, is available for download from here:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 6&id=21001