Perplexity new Game at Fandal

[Grevle]

Fandal has realeased a new Game a BBC Conversion Perplexity, Looks fun.. .

 

 

[Rybags]

http://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=6940

 

Looks pretty polished from the screenshot. I've not got any emu stuff installed at the moment so will have to check it out later on.

Good to see the scene is very much alive and well.

[Tezz]

Nice, a Pacmania inspired puzzle game. I've never seen the original before. Well done Fandal

Edited January 18, 2014 by Tezz

[Stormtrooper of Death]

I like the grafix

[+therealbountybob]

Now that looks like a promising game, great work Fandal & Irgendwer

[Sikor]

Nice game! Thx Fandal & Irgendwer.

[snicklin]

I've not heard of this game before, so congratulations to Fandal/Irgendwer for spotting the game.

 

It's appears to be quite a nice game, I am enjoying it. Thank you both for your hard work.

[powersoft]

just checked out one turn...

great GFX

nice sounds...

 

fandal and irgendwer, thanks for this great conversation.

I think the next days a lot of hours will be spent for playing this great game!

[snicklin]

It reminds me a lot of "Survivors" from Atlantis Games which to me was a very underestimated and under-known game.

[powersoft]

I would say a nice mix out of Pac-Man and Sokoban!

 

Nevertheless, real killer game!

Makes really much fun!

[Marius]

What a nice surprise. Well done fandal and irgendwir. Pretty challenging too.

[+MrFish]

Thanks Fandal & Irgendwer... Nice game, great job!

Edited January 19, 2014 by MrFish

[Irgendwer]

Thank you all for the kind words!

 

[xxl]

[+therealbountybob]

Nearly completed the first level just had 3 pairs of screw ups! Is there some info on this game / how many levels are there? Having level passwords is a great idea; Perplexity is really good reminded me a bit of my MITE game

[Irgendwer]

how many levels are there? Having level passwords is a great idea

 

16

 

Passwords are in the BBC original too, but we changed them to keep the motivation up.

[Gury]

Great conversion, fantastic arcade-puzzle game, thanks!

[+therealbountybob]

As one of the two readers of Fandal's blog I thought I'd translate the Czech to English and post it here... ok I used Google but it seemed to give up on the last line... too tough eh?!

>>>

Perplexity ( 01/06/2014 )

I have decided that I will enjoy . And anything less than some other port of the game from the machine BBC Micro. After two hiresových conversions ( Plan B , Alien 8 ) I have sought it finally Resolve portnout something in color. More specifically, a game in acornovském graphic mode 5, which corresponds to the text mode anticovskému fourth

I started because I struggled in December passed one after the other all about 1600 games , what I kdysivá downloaded from the net , and I was looking for suitable candidates for conversion. Actually the first time I've seen thus more or less everything that the gaming industry for the BBC Micro has created a must frankly say that I was quite a bit disappointed .

Most acornovských games is because , in my opinion, considerably (below ) average quality . I would say that for attention to the BBC Micro is , at best, only a few dozen games . The real gems among them , however, things from Audiogenic . Their games from the late eighties factors are very high , at least compared to the competition level somewhere else .

Other products on the contrary, are usually too weak. Lots of games are texting and not very convincing attempts acornovské rendition of the famous automatovek , mostly named differently than the original ( Zalaga place Galaga, etc. . ) . Apparently that was not a problem with copyright. Like it while someone be upset when , for example, of which about a dozen variations of the hit Centipede does not reach our atárkovské version of the best acornovská parody or ankles.

In addition , the game is only at Acorn be within the palette of eight colors to make relatively Dinky , but for some smooth movement of the user can leave the ice to appear . Most animations kicking and tears, a disaster are then over each passing objects , especially when there are more. In terms of writing games is simply a BBC Micro computer just as desperately poor as to be ZX Spectrum.

On top of that I totally dialed incredibly stupid and annoying " intros " to a series of games , which was probably the BBC Micro morbid sort of vintage fashion . With few exceptions, all those amazing introductory effects look like they wrote for homework pupil fifth grade in BASIC . What kind of pratt those Anglánum this for God 's sake advise? !

But to just criticize . For example, Barbarian , Citadel , Cholo , Elite , Exile , Frak , Imogen , Licence to Kill, Nevryon , Repton , Shark, Sim City, Strykers Run , The Last Ninja , The Sentinel , The Way of the Exploding Fist , Thunder Struck , Yie Ar Kung Fu, Zenon , Ziggy and others are undoubtedly hilarious things.

I am , however, for its first port did not select any color from these relatively complex games , lébrž I deliberately reached for something relatively simple . After much deliberation , I chose Games perplexity from fy Superior, primarily because it uses height of only 192 mikrorádku . And that means no trimming acornovského high image up to 256 scanlinek .

During the Christmas holidays I perplexity quite furiously and jumped over the four days I had almost finished port . The biggest problem was the same as Plan B , the visual memory which , at a width of 40 characters per line looks like Atari otherwise than on the BBC Micro. Conversely, graphics conversion went unexpectedly smoothly , until I myself wondering , because I already knew from the past that color coding Acorn has designed a little differently .

The eight-bit Atari known to define the color of the pixel size of 2x1 pairs of adjacent bits. The combination of 00, 01, 10 and 11 provide a choice of one of four colors and one four byte certain color pixels. The BBC Micro 's are fundamentally the same, but use different bit of steam . Instead atarácké combination with bit1 bit0 + takes + bit0 bit 4 instead of bit 3 bit 2 + couple + bit1 bit 5 , bit 4 instead of a combination of bit 2 bit 5 + + bit6 and finally place the remaining bit7 bit6 + Twins + bit3 bit7 .

So if one needs to flip from Acorn Atark some graphics mode from 5 must swap the relevant bits , to which the fly , I wrote a simple PC utility in Free Pascal. Transfer of course, concerns both graphical data , and masks. All this took place in the case of perplexity like butter , because - but I knew it in advance - choose a port for this particular production was extremely happy choice .

First author Ian Collinson game is the same type programmer like me , that program was divided into a block of custom code , only rarely interleaved data , and block graphics . So enough to grab one huge horns and especially continuous piece of mind to chase him my converter and virtually any graphics that have been resolved. Bravo, Ian!

Second, in perplexity virtually no use of camouflage , everything is pretty straight fights in the Screen . It is also mimošlapem reason why this kind of 3D Sokoban quite nimble despite the fact that every movement pacmanovské character moves exorbitant amount of data. The only thing in the game masked a bubble, a hero to the player at the beginning and possibly the end of Level speaks . And it ošéfovat it was an easy job.

Third, the design of the Screen perplexity made ??for further improvement with the use of powerful spells Atari machines . After a little adjustment, I completely discolored through interruption bottom status bar , while the side I put all the PMG objects of which went to other paints . The beauty of this is that the side panel is just so wide that the original graphics has gone all premaskovat . Being a single byte wide , it would be a problem .

Well , judge for yourself from the attached screenshots to port games perplexity of the eight-bit BBC Micro Atark hit . I do not quite like as perpetrators .

 

Perplexity on the BBC Micro

 

Perplexity on Atari

Otherwise, the current status of conversion is that with the help of colleagues Irgendwera fill up ataráckou version of the music and sounds that ACORN is really not possible to convert. If all goes well , this week, maybe it should be done, then it will be followed by a test ( as usual plus a few violent quarrel about some insignificant detail) and off it among the people .

What does it all mean? Portnout game from BBC Micro done in mode 5 ( 160x256 ) is not a dramatic thing, I'd say . Any clues I gave you think , or do not care , nelelkujeme a busy ramping up other projects ! I will zvjedaf , daragíje droogs .

<<<

[Collie]

Hello, I just came across this, and I'm amazed and thrilled that people are still playing a game I wrote 26 years ago, and even more excited that someone has ported it! Hope you had as much fun porting it as I had writing it first time around.

 

Shame I can't read Czech, but I read the translation. This bit made me smile:

 

First author Ian Collinson game is the same type programmer like me , that program was divided into a block of custom code , only rarely interleaved data , and block graphics . So enough to grab one huge horns and especially continuous piece of mind to chase him my converter and virtually any graphics that have been resolved. Bravo, Ian!

 

At the time I knew nothing about compression or anything like that, which I suppose made extracting data easier. Looking back on it, I could have used simple compression to get a lot more levels and graphics in the game.

 

Great job again on the conversion.

 

Ian C.

 

P.S. .sdrawkcab enut eht gniyalp yrT

[snicklin]

Hello, I just came across this, and I'm amazed and thrilled that people are still playing a game I wrote 26 years ago, and even more excited that someone has ported it! Hope you had as much fun porting it as I had writing it first time around.

 

Shame I can't read Czech, but I read the translation. This bit made me smile:

 

First author Ian Collinson game is the same type programmer like me , that program was divided into a block of custom code , only rarely interleaved data , and block graphics . So enough to grab one huge horns and especially continuous piece of mind to chase him my converter and virtually any graphics that have been resolved. Bravo, Ian!

 

At the time I knew nothing about compression or anything like that, which I suppose made extracting data easier. Looking back on it, I could have used simple compression to get a lot more levels and graphics in the game.

 

Great job again on the conversion.

 

Ian C.

 

P.S. .sdrawkcab enut eht gniyalp yrT

 

Oh I love stories like this where the author loves that there are new versions/ports of their game and that it is still loved.

 

The question that I always want to ask though is, would you like to write another game, perhaps for the Atari this time?

[Collie]

...

 

The question that I always want to ask though is, would you like to write another game, perhaps for the Atari this time?

 

 

Perplexity was the last game I wrote alone. They I went to university, and had a few non-games programming jobs. Since 2003 I've been back writing games, at Frontier Developments in Cambridge, for PC, consoles and mobile. Now with 2 kids it's unlikely I'll get time to do my own game in my own time. But we'll see.

[snicklin]

 

 

Perplexity was the last game I wrote alone. They I went to university, and had a few non-games programming jobs. Since 2003 I've been back writing games, at Frontier Developments in Cambridge, for PC, consoles and mobile. Now with 2 kids it's unlikely I'll get time to do my own game in my own time. But we'll see.

 

It's great that you got back into the industry and I am really happy that you've found people here who love your old game. I've enjoyed it myself.

 

I know what you mean about time. I'm writing a game and it's taken me absolutely ages in my spare time. The way I look at it is, if I don't start it then I'll never have a game. It is taking a long time and I only work on it perhaps every 3 months, but that's better than doing nothing at all. But one day, I'll have a game.

 

I used to work in automating business processes and I now work in developing ServiceNow (an IT service management product). But to come home and work on 6502 code is great as it is my real passion.

[Irgendwer]

P.S. .sdrawkcab enut eht gniyalp yrT

 

Cool easter egg! nworBnedloG!