I have had a ZX Spectrum Next since earlier in the year. I acquired it for ease of access to what is (for me) a long lost platform and a cool way of playing games for that in more convenient modern ways. I also thought I would try some of the new games that this community is putting out for this enhanced ‘next’ hardware although that wasn’t big thing for me.
I never expected to bother programming for it. It for sure looks interesting but I generally thought that I had other missions.
On July 15th 2020 I came across a facebook post, someone lamenting an old favourite Atari 800 game of theirs and it was called Knights and Chalices.
From what I could see in the picture this game looked like my kind of thing. Certainly I could see it was nothing advanced, but like the person who brought it up on facebook it is the kind of thing I would have spent hours fascinated with as a kid.
So sure enough, I found the game, downloaded it and ran in in the Altirra emulator and took a look. I didn’t understand the game at first, but I wanted to persevere and understand. The game takes place across two screens. The Knight leaves the castle and must cross a bridge to the second screen, retrieve a Chalice and return it to the castle, which you also needed to find a key to get back in (I guess they locked you out). On the bridge is a troll and there is an amulet that must be found to get past him. There are dragons, archer units that if you have collected the correct weapon you can defeat. Bumping into a wizard will teleport you and there are two objects that kill, which looks like a pond and some kind of pink rock. All the opponents and the weapons are randomly placed, so it is more a game of luck than skill. The end game is a score depending on how well you did.
It’s surprisingly addictive for something that is more luck than anything.
The game file is a .bas file. Yes, BASIC.
Anyway, I decided I liked the game so much that it and the person who originally authored it should have a tribute game on the ZX Spectrum Next. Part of the goal here was to sample some of the newer hardware features of the Next without bothering with weeks of assembly language time.
Anyway, one month after development started I’ve generally been on and off the project and here is the work in progress screenshot:
At the point of writing, that screenshot is a couple of weeks old now. As you might be able to tell, with the exception of the background I simply copied the Atari 800 graphics and I have the intent of filling them in with something multicolor.
It’s not that far off done now. You can play through the whole game and it has intro and end screens. No two player right now and I don’t know if I am doing that, but in the meantime I have to re-approach how sprites are handled and updated because the screenshot above showed ‘everything’ in order to make and debug the gameplay. I ended up optimizing that several times during the process and it’s gone too far down the route of being an interim, faster debug implementation than it has something final.
Stay tuned.