Origin stories
Some of you who are familiar with Revolution’s back story will recall that the idea for a new adventure developer was hatched at a series of meetings held in a house in deepest north Wales - the house being owned by the Cecil family. Back in the late 1980’s the place was very basic; all day electric was a bonus! Dave Sykes and myself would return there quite often in 1990-1 to code big chunks of Lure and, later, Dave Cummins and myself were sent to write the first design script for Beneath a Steel Sky. I’d not been back there since the mid 2000s but, two weeks ago, made a return visit. My purpose was much the same as previous visits - to get a bunch of coding done!
The coding in question was UrbX Warriors and assembly language, marking a strange parallel to those visits thirty years ago. The weather was perfect for it - wet and windy - but this time the power was stable and complimented by decently fast internet. I even got a last day visit from Chuck Cecil himself. Wine was drunk, and notes were swapped on the shoddy state of the games industry and both our respective plans. Maybe one day we’ll do that pyramid and hieroglyph game together!
UrbX itself is doing pretty well, I’m pleased to say. As the code grows it’s getting slightly harder to grasp the whole thing, mentally, but it’s still a relatively small compared to any given PC game. At one point I was panicking because when I saw that my 16Kb of memory allocated to code was running out, but then I realised that code, just as graphics, can be bank switched in and out. Phew. A bigger problem is that we’re running out of sprite designs - 128 of these are available, each a mere 16x16 pixels. Our main character uses a serious chunk of these before any baddie makes an appearance. The plan is to break off any frames that aren’t in constant use - such as player dying - and switch them in on demand. We can also switch palettes on the enemy to make it look like there are more designs that there actually are. But this is the world of 8bit hardware! Nothing is simple.
And what of my other game, Wormhole Dungeon? Obviously, this has been pushed to the sidelines somewhat while I blast through UrbX. I think a three-month (so far) break from daily coding on it has been a good thing, on reflection. Something was niggling in the back of my mind that I couldn’t quite get a fix on. Now I think I see a pretty minor problem with the way some of the combat works was probably the culprit. I kind of dreamt it then had a look at the game and saw the truth. This is truly the power of doing nothing for a long time! I recommend it. The answers always come. It’s actually very easy to change, so fingers crossed I have nailed it and put the project back on course for greatness ;)
Finally, some of you will have seen me posting elsewhere about my Ukraine fundraiser. The story is that back in the mid 1990’s, when Broken Sword 1 came out, the publisher made a bunch of pewter Templar key-rings as marketing materials for the game. I would guess most of them went to journalists, and so on, but we at Revolution got a couple of dozen of them as well. They were really quite nice, but in short supply. Both myself and Charles have used ours ever since - they’ve worn slightly smooth, but otherwise have stood the test of time. Anyway, I found a way to get some more made up and now have a couple of hundred of them. If you’d like one (or more) then head over here. All profits to the Ukraine war effort.
