- Stephen Nichol
Announcing My New Homebrew Retro Platformer (November 2014)
Having set myself the goal of creating two ZX Spectrum homebrew games by the end of 2014, on Saturday 15th November 2014, I completed the first. It's a 2D platformer called Cap'n Rescue, in which you play a Captain trapped inside the body of a monkey, trying to locate your human body, whilst dodging enemies and collecting treasure along the way.
The game was completed in the recent v4.6 release of Jonathan Cauldwell's AGD (Arcade Game Designer), which - if you don't know already - provides an editor and reasonably straightforward language reminiscent of BASIC to create games which are then output as standalone machine code routines.
This is a much less stressful route to creating a professional looking game, than coding in assembly lanuage, with perhaps the only disadvantage being a lack of flexibility in some areas (the language is like BASIC but, it is not exactly the same). As AGD has now been in development for 6 years and is on, at the time of publication, the aforementioned version 4.6, it is packed full of features. Having been ill recently, I certainly found it a useful tool, and it was even possible to work on the game with other people in the room and background noise.
The only thing I really struggled with was adding interrupt driven music and considering back in the old days no-one thought in-game music was possible on the ZX Spectrum, I'm not too ashamed about that one.
Special thanks to Paul Jenkinson, who answered my question about which version of AGD was the most stable, and whose blog contains a set of very helpful video tutorials on making games in AGD.
The other project I have been working on is a Graphic Adventure called When Alex Didn't Do It, also for the 48k ZX Spectrum. As the game has exceeded a single 48k load, technically speaking I have already acheived my personal goal of two games. I hope to put out WADDI by the 31st December 2014 at the latest.
CAP'N RESCUE should be showing up soon in an archive near you.
Thanks for reading.
Stephen (Ste) Nichol
UPDATE 12/2/2016 @ 1:02am - You can get the latest version of Cap'n Rescue on the new Downloads page!
UPDATE 20/8/2015 @ 9:49pm - Cap'n Rescue is now built in to the ZX Spectrum Vega handheld console!