More youthful pie-in-the-sky: random edition!
Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2023 12:03 pm
Back when I was actively coming up with ideas for Spectrum games, it wasn't all big, licensed properties, nor was it all arcade/action games. I was often inspired by games on other systems, and tried to imagine how something similar could be accomplished on the Speccy. There were also instances of Spectrum games inspiring spoofs, or arcade conversions whose graphics were nowhere near the best the machine could offer (an opinion grounded entirely in my ignorance of coding, and precisely what could be made to fit in 48K/128K of RAM).
As I root through my tape archives, and the bits and bobs I've transferred over to the SAM, I'll add some of the highlights into this thread, since most of these really won't warrant a threat of their own. I've noticed, for example, that I put much more effort into things when I was either working on paper or on the Spectrum, using The Artist II, and the quality of my Spectrum-oriented material dropped off considerably when I moved onto the SAM Coupé... not that my early SAM stuff was much more than recoloured Spectrum-style graphics...
To kick things off, Here are a few SCREEN$ from a graphic adventure I was designing, back in my teens, somewhat inspired by the format of It Came From The Desert and Antheads on the Amiga. It's essentially a kind of 'visual novel'-type experience, and the premise seems to have been that a couple of investigators are looking into reports of possible alien activity in a small, desert settlement. Pretty sure I never came up with a full story but, if I did, it's long-forgotten.
Essentially, most the game would be played through a rudimentary first-person view, stepping from (mostly static) location to location, with occasional bits of incidental animation, like the ceiling fan in the bar in the second image. The main window would also accommodate battle scenes, where you have to defend yourself against angry locals. The lefthand side of the screen would have a character portrait - Sadler and Barrett being the two protagonists. I seem to remember the idea was that you could switch between them at will, but I didn't include an on-screen button to accomplish this, so I'm not certain what my thinking was on that score. Below the character portrait is a bio readout, which would show injuries, exertion, etc. along with a compass and a bag icon indicating your inventory. Across the bottom of the screen is a text window for dialogue and the player characters' streams of consciousness.
As shown in the second image here, the game would occasionally feature exploration/evasion scenes from a top-down perspective - like the hospital escape scenes in It Came From The Desert. Stuff like breaking into secret military bases to search for evidence, or breaking out of captivity if arrested. The text window would offer numbered dialogue choices (so, presumably, I wasn't intending point-and-click controls of any kind).
Didn't get very far with the characters, and there was basically just one pose for the male characters, and one pose for the female characters, with different faces/expressions and clothing options for each. Of the two sets, I think the female characters ended up far less distinct... I remember having a much harder time coming up with viable clothing and hair alternatives for them. Probably would have helped if I'd come up with some actual characters.
I'm a big fan of this style of game - It Came From The Desert was a big part of the reason I got an Amiga, eventually - and I've been larking about with a Visual Novel development kit called Ren'Py over the last few years. Might be interesting, at some point, to attempt a Ren'Py visual novel using Spectrum-style graphics...
As I root through my tape archives, and the bits and bobs I've transferred over to the SAM, I'll add some of the highlights into this thread, since most of these really won't warrant a threat of their own. I've noticed, for example, that I put much more effort into things when I was either working on paper or on the Spectrum, using The Artist II, and the quality of my Spectrum-oriented material dropped off considerably when I moved onto the SAM Coupé... not that my early SAM stuff was much more than recoloured Spectrum-style graphics...
To kick things off, Here are a few SCREEN$ from a graphic adventure I was designing, back in my teens, somewhat inspired by the format of It Came From The Desert and Antheads on the Amiga. It's essentially a kind of 'visual novel'-type experience, and the premise seems to have been that a couple of investigators are looking into reports of possible alien activity in a small, desert settlement. Pretty sure I never came up with a full story but, if I did, it's long-forgotten.
Essentially, most the game would be played through a rudimentary first-person view, stepping from (mostly static) location to location, with occasional bits of incidental animation, like the ceiling fan in the bar in the second image. The main window would also accommodate battle scenes, where you have to defend yourself against angry locals. The lefthand side of the screen would have a character portrait - Sadler and Barrett being the two protagonists. I seem to remember the idea was that you could switch between them at will, but I didn't include an on-screen button to accomplish this, so I'm not certain what my thinking was on that score. Below the character portrait is a bio readout, which would show injuries, exertion, etc. along with a compass and a bag icon indicating your inventory. Across the bottom of the screen is a text window for dialogue and the player characters' streams of consciousness.
As shown in the second image here, the game would occasionally feature exploration/evasion scenes from a top-down perspective - like the hospital escape scenes in It Came From The Desert. Stuff like breaking into secret military bases to search for evidence, or breaking out of captivity if arrested. The text window would offer numbered dialogue choices (so, presumably, I wasn't intending point-and-click controls of any kind).
Didn't get very far with the characters, and there was basically just one pose for the male characters, and one pose for the female characters, with different faces/expressions and clothing options for each. Of the two sets, I think the female characters ended up far less distinct... I remember having a much harder time coming up with viable clothing and hair alternatives for them. Probably would have helped if I'd come up with some actual characters.
I'm a big fan of this style of game - It Came From The Desert was a big part of the reason I got an Amiga, eventually - and I've been larking about with a Visual Novel development kit called Ren'Py over the last few years. Might be interesting, at some point, to attempt a Ren'Py visual novel using Spectrum-style graphics...