SQIJ for Taito L System.

Sokurah

Sokurah

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72CR
I'm a bit bored at work, so here's an announcement of an upcoming homebrew game.

Perhaps some of you know the game SQIJ on the C64? Well, it wasn't exactly a stellar game ... and the Spectrum version that was released the year after (in 1987) was even worse. Literally unplayable to be exact.

Well, a couple of months ago I released a remake of SQIJ for Spectrum, which was based on the C64 version. Humbly I must say that I think my Spectrum version is better than the C64 version. Perhaps not as pretty or as good sounding ... but it's more playable because you don't die as fast as you do in the C64 version.

It looks like this;

final1.png


Alright, so a while after I released I though "why not port it to the Taito L System too?"

... so that's what I did
smiley36.gif


Well, it's more a complete rewrite than a port, but as I could reuse all the data and a lot of the source, it wasn't a huge task.

It's basically done. I'm waiting on AY music from the musician and I have to make some better soundFX for it. I also have to tweak the spawn-speed of the enemies, but I'll do that once I have the music. Other than that it's completely done. However, I hope to have cmonkey test it on the real hardware too before I release it, but its release isn't too far off.

This is my second L System game after doing Speccies 2 in 2015.

Here's two pictures of it - the main menu and one of the in-game screens;

1menu.png


2ingame.png
 
Sokurah

Sokurah

Newbie
Credits
72CR
I've been holding back on the release of this one, because I hoped I could have it tested on the real hardware first, but I decided to put it out there anyway. If any problems does reveal themselves later then I'll update the game.

So, SQIJ 2018 for the Taito L System is officially done. Enjoy :)

Download it and read more about it here: http://tardis.dk/wordpress/?page_id=1695

Sokurah2018-05-04 12:32:57
 
favouredson

favouredson

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1,256CR
Sokurah said:
Do you have any sort of positive or negative feedback on it?
Click to expand...

Both.

Negative, it's not a very good game and far too short. (Game over on completion and no retry with increased difficulty.)
Once I figured out where things were located it was over quite quickly.
(I spent more time shooting enemies for points than completing the task at hand.)

Positive would be all the work you did on it. It looks and sounds good and it plays well.
If only it was as enjoyable as Speccies 2 I would be happy to keep playing.
 
Sokurah

Sokurah

Newbie
Credits
72CR
favouredson said:
Sokurah said:
Do you have any sort of positive or negative feedback on it?
Click to expand...
Both.

Negative, it's not a very good game and far too short. (Game over on completion and no retry with increased difficulty.)
Once I figured out where things were located it was over quite quickly.
(I spent more time shooting enemies for points than completing the task at hand.)

Positive would be all the work you did on it. It looks and sounds good and it plays well.
If only it was as enjoyable as Speccies 2 I would be happy to keep playing.
Click to expand...

Yeah, content-wise it's pretty much on the light side. I ported it mostly because I'd just remade it for the Spectrum and I had everything about it fresh in my head, so I figured I could do it relatively fast. But while moderately enjoyable I know it could have been more ... but I honestly couldn't be bothered to add further to it. It wasn't really supposed to be a "mega game".

Interestingly though, I did expand on the game for the Spectrum cassette release (which was finished before I started the arcade version), so that one has 17 more screens + different sets of positions for items and shields, so the layout of the maze isn't always the same. But for some reason I decided to base the arcade version on the original version.

I'll do better on my next game - I've planned something big
smiley2.gif
(won't be anytime soon though).
 
Sokurah

Sokurah

Newbie
Credits
72CR
Back in June I released my version of SQIJ for Taito’s arcade hardware and that’s the game there is an update to now.

arcadelogo.png


If you only intend to play this game on the MAME emulator you won’t see a difference, but if you are among the very little handful of people who might want to burn this game onto EEPROMS and run it on the real hardware, then there is a big difference. See, the MAME emulator is not the most accurate emulator – it only emulates the hardware “well enough” so that the games work, but don’t actually emulate the hardware 100%, which means that it’s very easy to code something that works perfectly in MAME, but fails once it’s deployed to the real hardware as the hardware has some weird idiosyncrasies in its design.

And SQIJ did have a number of problems on the real hardware. None that were actually game-breaking (mostly visual stuff) but after A LOT of debugging and tweaking the game finally runs completely identical on emulation AND the real hardware.

This would not have been possible without the huge assistance from my good friend Adrian, who – to be fair – did most of the work making this update possible. So a BIG thank you to Ade - aka. @cmonkey.

The game can still be downloaded at the same link, here; http://tardis.dk/wordpress/?page_id=1695
 
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