Galactic Gladiators and Galactic Adventures

...are two strategy/RPG games from the early 80's, designed and programmed by Tom Reamy (he only made these two games afaik).

The player(s) assumes command over a band of alien adventurers armed with things like disruptors and laser swords. Like in most RPGs, the characters all have names, stats, XP and equipment. Both games uses single screen arenas/sites where two teams of 1-7 characters or so can duke out. In Galactic Adventures you can travel between different planets, exploring new locations for treasure. As I understand it, there's no final goal, other than what you may set up yourself.



During combat, the players (human or AI) first take turns to give orders to their characters (perhaps in secret), and then watch the action play out in a real time segment, one character at a time. If everyone moved and fired at the same time, it would be more difficult to follow events that unfold on multiple fronts (although it would be more realistic and cooler to watch).

I think the intent of the author was to capture the freeform adventure feel that early Flash Gordon, Doctor Who and Star Trek TOS had... and perhaps their newer incarnations lack.

I have only tried Galactic Gladiators (using DosBox of course). The interface is very primitive, but you can make the AI play against itself and just watch.



Reference:
The manual for Galactic Adventures (I can't find the one for Gladiators).

Videos (Apple II versions):
Galactic Gladiators
Galactic Adventures


Other random finds:
Mother Brain Has Been Aliving!
Too cute. Sad end.
Hero Quest music, ZX Spectrum

Diablo

I don't have much games on my Mac. In a way it's kind of good, because games make me feel unproductive. It would be great if games could educate me in some way, or allow me save and even share what I have accomplished in the game (e.g. Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress). Leveling up a number is less interesting to me. It can be fun to become better at a player skill oriented game (e.g. Tribes), but ultimately that feels like a waste of time too.

It's a bit of a tangent perhaps. I felt like sharing some thoughs. This is a blog after all. Maybe I should treat it as such and post more often. In respect to Diablo... I think it's a game about building a character. I always liked the character creation and development aspect of games, be it Starflight, Spore, or Dungeons & Dragons. I often play the wrong class (e.g. warrior sorceress) in Diablo 2 because I enjoy playing like I shouldn't. Feels more creative.

Diablo 1 allowed you to mix things up more (Magic being learned from books), but the game isn't available in Blizzards BattleNet store. While the Diablo games did a good job at giving you what felt like personal items, most of the items actually disappear into the information swallowing black hole that is the town store. Anyways, personally I'd like the see the character personalization aspect taken further, be it wearing in boots and gear, naming things, changing graphical appearances, or even stuff like home decoration and pets, as seen in some Japanese dungeon raiding games (e.g. Azure Dreams).

Anyways. I have hastily put together a rather incoherent page with some notes and random ideas. I'm not sure where it's heading.

Diablo page

Ett Hav av Skräck.

This was found in a Yule ornament box.

It's dated June 11th 1990.


Enter if you dare (and can read Swedish).

Humble Indie Bundle 2

The Humble Indie Bundle #2

As some of you may know, I'm doing stuff for Cortex Command every now and then. It's an indie game developed by DataRealms, and it's included in the Humble Indie Bundle #2 which just went public.

Cortex Command is very much a work in progress. We've been making slow progress since about 2004 or earlier. Fortunately, it's one of those games which is already graphically aged. If a new impressive 3D engine comes out (making other 3D games look bad) it doesn't affect us as much, because the qualities of our game lies elsewhere. Perhaps people approach the game with different expectations too. On top of this, we have a talented and active modding community, and this always extends a lifetime of a game. Mods and modding is probably where the main enjoyment of the game lies now, because I haven't been doing as much content as I should have.

Right now I'm redoing the intro slides that I'm not happy with. Most of the assets that I did felt like sloppy placeholders, so I really want to get started on doing the stuff that is detailed in the design/fluff docs. It will be needed for strategical meta game layer that we've been working on. New in this build of the game (B24?) is... some... skirmish thing.

I'd link my CC stuff and DataRealms here, but it appears the server died. Stop all the downloadin'! Help computer!

Oh yeah, above are some pin-ups that I did for the HIB2 promo page. Hopefully I didn't offend the other developers with my chibified interpretations of their characters.

Edit: I've made a simple page with some of my other HIB promo art.

A few updates

MoO project - See update section.

C21 online - This is a Japanese MMO that I researched. It has some nice robot design here and there.

Paradroid - Cleaned up a few of the roughs.

Elite game - I've added some scribbles at the bottom of this half finished Elite-I-don't-know-what-I-derailed page.

Spotter Challenge!

When Megaman found a new ruin site to explore, Roll had him running errands instead. This was a perfect opportunity for Tron to sneak in, grab the treasure and lay in ambush. However, the ruin is populated by several new Reaverbot types, none of which are in Tron's database. Can you help her to identify them?



EDIT: Revealed the source sprites.


The 3DS, Kid Icarus, and MML3 announcements all came as a surprise to me. I often complain about 3rd person 3D games and how their inability to present clear spatial information to the player can hamper certain game design verbs. For example, in the game Space Harrier, aiming can be a bit tricky. In the new 3D Mario games, there aren't a lot of complex destructible block situations, precision jumping, and things which we saw Mario do in the early 2D games.

However, I'm cautiously excited about the potential of the 3DS to address these issues. Even older games where 3 dimensional spatial relationships are important can become much more playable... if the 3DS is as effective as advertised.



So, naturally I'm curious about how MML3 will utilize the 3D screen. Just how it will affect immersion during dungeon crawling, or dog fights? Could a line of reticles meeting up with the enemies give the player a better aiming experience? Will the 3D screen be used for something quite unexpected and great, or will it end up being a forced gimmick?

I'm also curious about this 'new development approach' mentioned by Inafune, and how MML3 somehow would be a game 'for us'.


I'm very tempted to revisit my own Reaverbot Legends project now. I've linked it below, in case anyone is interested. The part which was most appealing to me about MML was the enigma of the Reaverbots, the Digger community, and of course the Tron Bonne character. I really liked the MML series and I hope MML3 turns out great and Inafune has fun making it (he did seem pretty excited). Edit: Wait. He quits and becomes indie?

Edit: Also.

Edit: I've actually been updating my MML page a little recently.

Marathon

I've put up a small Marathon page. Slightly related, does anyone know if a ray casting (e.g. Wolfenstein) used textures like this? Seems like an obvious thing to do, but maybe it would require too much memory because of all the angles you need to pre-render, especially in an engine where you can have player elevation. I think it could look impressive, anyways.

I'm of course not talking about modern stuff like normal/bump/parallax mapping here. Just a few pre-rendered texture view angles (still drawn square from the front). If a texture is symmetrical, we can do some mirroring when reading the raycasted columns and save some memory there. The textures would probably need to have flat L/R edges (unlike my example here).