I announced here last year in December that I was working on a new Amstrad CPC game, although I had started the project in November. I’m still quite hesitant to announce a new game until I know I will finish it, despite doing this for almost ten years now.
The game is essentially what I planned: whip action fighting enemies, a good sized dungeon to navigate, and levers and keys to implement some basic puzzles. Which is always a bit of a refreshing surprise because very often the finished game is not quite what I had in mind when I started the project.
I took some risks on this one, by using an engine I wrote for performance, but that requires a lot of memory for a 64K game –essentially 16K for the hardware back buffer–, and that can always affect the size of the resulting game.
I put a lot of time into the encoding of the screens, using a new idea I had never implemented before based on meta-tiles of variable size –a bit more advanced than what I described here–, and at the end I managed to cram in 6 different enemy types with their own behaviour, a final boss, 55 screens and 4 music tunes –menu, in-game, game over and boss fight–.
In reality is not that you have 64K, it was in this case 32000 bytes of usable memory, and I finished the game having 162 bytes left. It was a tense when I had to fix a couple of last minutes bugs!
One of the screens on the game
The game is framed in the world of fantasy of my 7 years old son, mixed a little bit with the universe of the Fablehaven novels by Brandon Mull, that happens to be mostly “compatible”.
You could argue that is not that important, because we all know that what it was written on the inlay of the 8-bit games from the 80s was just some filler that may or may not fit the actual game, but in this case it was an important source of inspiration when designing the enemies and the mood of the game. I don’t know if I succeeded, but my son is happy with the result, and that’s the gold standard for Salamanderland!
I made some decision regarding gameplay that I knew that could be controversial: tight jumps –I implemented “coyote time”, so it shouldn’t be that hard–, and classic “3 lives and game over”. It is an 8-bit game, these shouldn’t be a problem, isn’t it?
My hope is that players will persevere and get to enjoy the game for what it is. Of course there will be people that will get frustrated and quit, but that’s something that can always happen, no matter what game you make. If you can’t make everybody happy, be sure it is you that is satisfied with the result.
The game can be downloaded and played for free here: The Heart of Salamanderland, and a physical edition by Poly Play is planned for later this year –more information about that soon!–.