Sabbat

This Halloween, Arkanix Labs, in conjunction with Retro64, has released a C64 demo called 'Sabbat' which features my pixels and one of two of my first SID tunes to ever feature in a C64 demo.  The demo is subtitled 'Retroween II' as it is a follow up to an older demo called 'Retroween'.

In the image above, all of the bitmaps, charsets and sprites were pixelled by me, other than the pumpkin/knife bitmap which was pixelled by Warlock.

The clown bitmap, based on 'Pennywise' from the 1990 TV mini-series 'It' was actually started back around 1999 (along with my Matrix Loader bitmap) and has been pixelled on and off since then, the main issue being the hair which seemed to cause no end of problems for no apparent reason. It was started in Advanced Art Studio and ended up being completed in Project One.  All other bitmaps were pixelled in Project One.

The hires silhouette image was also pixelled in Project One, but converted into chars for the demo by Moloch.  The sprites were pixelled in SpritePad V1.7, with the zombie sprite already making an appearance in my SEUCK compo entry 'Zombie Brain Eaters' earlier this year.  The charset font in the scrolling message was pixelled in Ultrafont.

After searching through the HVSC for a decent, ghoulish sounding SID tune, I decided to pluck up the courage and compose something myself in Goattracker.  Not bad for a first effort and it fits the demo quite well, but there is soooo much learning to do with the SID chip, things can only improve.

The demo can be downloaded from it's CSDb page here...

However, by downloading directly from this blog, you can also get the raw image files in Koala format, the sprites in SpritePad format and the music in Goattracker format.  Download a zip file with all this here...

Zombie Brain Eaters

Time for something a little different.

Between January and April this year, Richard Bayliss of 'The New Dimension' has been running the 'SEUCK Compo 2013'.  For those who don't know, SEUCK (Shoot 'Em-Up Construction Kit) is a game creation tool that was released by Sensible Software back in  1987.  To save my fingers typing about SEUCK, more information can be found in a Wikipedia entry here...

I bought this kit on cassette back in 1987 along with thousands of other people and quickly realised that, although it was one of the best creation tools available at the time with some pretty powerful built in utilities (I STILL love the simplicity of the sprite editor), it was never going to help you make commercial quality software.

I've found it astonishing that some people persist in making games using SEUCK even to this day and to be honest I think I've been less than complimentary about anything that anyone has made, particularly recently given the number of tools now available on the internet to learn machine code and produce graphics and music.

To that end, I've decided to put my pixels where my mouth is and try to produce a halfway decent SEUCK game and something a little different to the 'million' space/helicopter/car (*delete as applicable) shoot 'em up's out there.  Introducing 'Zombie Brain Eaters'.

I decided not to use the original vertically scrolling SEUCK, but the 'newer' horizontally scrolling 'Sideways SEUCK' hacked together from the original code by Jon Wells.  Information about this sideways version can be found here...

The reason for using the sideways version?  I wanted to create an 'Operation Wolf' type shooting game, but with zombies!  There are 4 looping levels and the point of the game is simple: survive without being bitten, shoot zombies and amass a high score.  All the graphics in the game were pixelled by me using all the built-in SEUCK tools.  Some trivia:  one of the smaller sideways walking zombie sprites will soon make another appearance in an Arkanix Labs demo called Sabbat!

To accompany the game, I've pixelled a 'loading screen' and written a note file with details of the game 'story', controls, hints and tips and some credits.  Richard Bayliss has kindly written some new music for the title screen and has even 'installed' the music into the final game for me.  A special thanks must go to Andrew 'Merman' Fisher of 'The SEUCK Vault' for play-testing and offering support and advice.

Information about the SEUCK Compo 2013 can be found on TND's website here...

The competition has it's own compo page on CSDb here...

Zombie Brain Eaters has it's own entry on CSDb here.  On that page are various versions of the game for download.

However, by directly downloading from this blog, you'll get a zip file that contains the versions mentioned above on CSDb in the 'enhanced' folder, in addition to a folder called 'original' that contains my original disk image submission with the game with no music along with some assets that include the loading screen in koala format, the music from the title screen in SID format and the original 'all data' save file that can be loaded into Sideways SEUCK to play around with.  The zip file can be downloaded here...

UPDATE:

The competition results are in and 'Zombie Brain Eaters' came a semi-respectable 4th place out of 11 entries.