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Kickstarter has become an important way for homebrew developers to get their finished product into the hands of the gamer. Two of the games featured this month have gone that route – Trials of Kharzoid has already been successfully funded, while Cronela’s Mansion is preparing to launch with plenty of rewards and great-looking boxed versions. Meanwhile, our Champion Coder favours the BBC Micro, and we have three very different reviews to explore.
MADCAP MANSION
Interview with Francesco 'Straynus' Terraciano
Creator of Cronela's Mansion
https://x.com/straynus - @Straynus on X/Twitter
What got you into programming your own games?
I have been playing video games all my life, of all styles, I value their art, their music and everything that each one of them makes me feel. One summer night I saw a boy dressed as a character from a not-so-well-known video game that I liked. At that moment I felt something strange. I thought I would like someone to dress up as a character I created or hang a poster of my game in their room and remember for their entire life the story of my video game, its characters, and what it made them feel at that moment in their life. And remember it with nostalgia in the future.
I started creating video games so that somewhere in the world someone would have something created by me that would accompany them throughout their lives. If that happened, I would feel fulfilled.
What has been the major influence on Cronela's Mansion?
My favourite game is Maniac Mansion, the NES version to be more exact. I always wanted to play a similar game on NES again, but it never happened. From there Cronela's Mansion was born, which although it is totally inspired by MM, has many things that will differentiate it, as well as the music, the more detailed artistic style, and some mechanics.
How difficult is it to create a point-and-click adventure?
Depends! Creating a point-and-click for retro systems like the NES and GBA has been a real feat, which not only requires a lot of low-level programming knowledge but also a lot of patience and years of hard work, overcoming obstacles every day.
Creating a point-and-click for PC and modern consoles, is very easy, in terms of programming. Now, telling a good story, and creating original and difficult puzzles, creating a good adventure video game is another story.
What made you want to target so many different (Nintendo) systems?
When I got it, I thought, what if I also made it compatible with Super Nintendo? And then came Game Boy and the most difficult Game Boy Advance!
It wasn't something planned, it came out little by little.
How are the graphics and sound being created?
Creating PC scenes is very easy, there are no limitations. The problems come when the scenes are for NES and SNES, including GB and GBA. There are many colour limitations here and unique pixels. So it is necessary to “repeat” details to fill a scene.
To create 8-bit music you use “ Famitracker, which is a free Windows tracker for producing music for the NES/Famicom systems. In my case, I have had to redo the songs in various formats depending on the version of the game.
What is your development environment and the major tools you are using?
To program Cronela's Mansion for NES, we have created our own engine, using 6502 assembler. It was impossible to create this game with programs like "NESmaker". For the Game Boy versions he used "GBStudio".
And for modern versions, I have used Unity!
What perks and stretch goals have you got planned for the Kickstarter?
Well, I'm still thinking about good goals! But one of them would undoubtedly be to create a version compatible with Sega or C64.
What have been the most difficult parts of the game to create so far?
Without a doubt, the NES-compatible version has been the most difficult. From the beginning to the end, from the graphics, the music, the mechanics, the collisions, the commands, the dialogues, everything has been very difficult in this version, but if I had to say only one thing, I would say that the most difficult thing has been the inventory, objects, there are too many variables, and this made us sweat a lot. But overall, I could have made the game simpler, with simpler music, and simpler scenarios, but I didn't want this, I pushed the NES to the limit in everything I did, so when I see the result of the game, I think that everything and the time invested has been worth it.
Are you looking to mix horror and humour in the game, like Maniac Mansion?
Yes, that's how it is! I loved that Maniac Mansion had that somewhat strange humour, Cronela's Mansion is a video game with a dark and sad story, but the jokes are guaranteed and throughout the tour, we will have more than one laugh at the incredible or strange things that we can see, just as there will be more tense and dramatic moments.
What other games have you developed?
Cronela's Mansion is my first video game, so I have put everything I have into this project for years.
Will there be any Easter Eggs or references to other games?
Yes, quite a few hehe. They will be quite hidden, but the person who finds them or stumbles upon them will have a great day, especially one of them that will be totally related to Maniac Mansion, I think it will be very funny for MM fans.
Would you be interested in doing a sequel if this project goes well?
Cronela's Mansion 2, 3? When do I start?
That would be a dream, of course, if the Kickstarter campaign is quite successful, I'd like a full saga! With collector's editions, a saga that continues for many years.
Do you have anything else in development?
No! Hehe. At the moment Cronela's Mansion takes up all my time and energy. But I wouldn't hate the idea of being able to make a saga of Cronela's Mansion.
What other point-and-click games have you played recently?
Lately, I haven't had much time to play other games, but I have found time to play "The Adventures of the Black Hawk" by Croqueta Asesina Studios, a Spanish studio. This game has achieved an aesthetic very similar to the LucasArts games, with a great soundtrack, graphics, and an incredible story.
I want to take advantage of this space to thank all the readers, and all the people who are getting involved with my project in some way, especially you Andrew, Thank you for the interview and all your support since we met.
NEWS BYTES
AMSTRAD CPC: Solve a riddle behind this link and find part 1 of The Key, the English translation of Pakete Soft’s point-and-click adventure. https://bit.ly/thekey-cpc
BBC MICRO: Martin Moxon’s Elite Compendium brings together all his hacks, including the docking computer and the troublesome Trumbles. https://bit.ly/elite-compendium
C64: For more point-and-click action, check out Broken Mirror (pictured) by Tommie Hansmar - https://bit.ly/brokenmirror-c64
GAME BOY: Version 4.0 of GBStudio has been released at https://bit.ly/gbstudio4 and there’s a great guide to GBDK-developed games at https://bit.ly/gbdk-showcase
JAGUAR: Lawrence Staveley of Reboot Games converted Haplo’s Tenebra and Tenebra 2. https://h4plo.itch.io/
ORIC: Defence Force has updated its itch page with multiple releases, including Oricium, Impossible Mission, and Stormlord from Jonathan Bristow. https://defenceforce.itch.io/
PICO-8: Carve wooden replicas of different shapes in the brilliant Woodworm. https://bit.ly/woodworm-p8
Find top-rated PICO-8 games thanks to Nerdy Teachers’ curated list - https://bit.ly/curated-p8
PLUS/4: Another incredible conversion from TCFS, Unreal and Csabo arrives in the form of Prince of Persia - https://bit.ly/persia-plus4
VIC-20: In an alternate timeline, all cars on the road are Teslas and Elon has become a frog – enjoy Aleksei Eben’s Tesla Frogger at https://bit.ly/tesla-frogger
ZX SPECTRUM: Bearsden Primary School pupils have again used their creativity to develop 14 new Spectrum games with AGD. https://bit.ly/bearsden2024
ZX81: Check out Adrian Pilkington’s recent 16K games, including Maze, Jump, Scroll Zone, and Pirate Invaders. https://adrianpilko.itch.io/
CHAMPION CODER
Name: Chris Bradburne
Location: Godalming, UK
Website: https://bit.ly/chrisb-bbc
Format: BBC Micro (B/B+/Master)
Previous games: Castle Defender, Night Ninja, Acorn Island, Untitled Dungeon Game
Currently working on: Voxel Demo (BBC)
What got you into programming the BBC Micro?
This was the machine that my dad purchased back in the day. They were also the machines that were at school so there was plenty of exposure. I would have been around 10 years old when we got a BBC B at home, and I recall many hours using the machine.
Since then I’ve always programmed for fun (and occasionally as part of a job but it’s never been the focus) and I wrote BASIC and then some limited assembler as a teenager. I eventually moved on to other things – ARM and X86 but I have a soft spot for the Beeb.
I don’t recall why I went back to the BBC in 2015 – I think I just found the now-defunct retrosoftware forum and got inspired to try something myself. Actually write the game that you were going to be famous for when you were a kid!
What is your development setup and what tools do you use?
These days emulators for BBC Micros are so good that I use these for most of the development testing so it’s all laptop-based. My general workflow uses BeebEm, but I’ll use B2 and B-Em depending on what I’m trying to do. For code editing, I use VSCode with the Beeb VSC extension. For code assembly, I use the Beebasm assembler which has a syntax that is based on the inbuilt BBC BASIC assembler.
There are also lots of great tools that the Beeb community have produced. Some of the main ones are BeebSpriter for sprite editing and the BBC micro image converter for converting to the Beeb’s screen format.
I’ll sometimes write an initial algorithm in Basic (usually on BBC Basic for SDL) and use this as a basis converting pieces of Basic to assembler as I go.
What has been your favourite title to develop so far?
That’s a tricky one. Each of my titles I’ve tried to do something new or different to the previous title. For example, the first game – Castle Defender – is a tower defence game. That’s a genre that didn’t exist when the BBC came out so I thought it would be fun to try and do something within the limitation of the machine. The Untitled Dungeon Game was about using the extended RAM of the Master and Acorn Island was procedural landscape generation and 4-way scrolling. Even my implementation of Wordle which is quite simple was an exercise in storing a large dictionary in a small amount of space.
My favourite to play is probably Night Ninja which was my attempt at large spites and fast action. It was also my first pure assembler game that got rid of the OS. With the layers of abstraction and black boxes today there is something quite reassuring about having (almost) complete control of the machine.
What made you choose to remake Ghostbusters?
Because “Dave_E” asked on the Stardot forums! I do remember seeing the game at its time of release in the 80s with its iconic large car driving along the streets. Probably with a tinge of envy that it wasn’t available the machine I had at home. Once he’d asked it got stuck in my head, so I had a go at some of the components like the driving screen and then you’ve started, and it seems a pity to not see it to conclusion…
To be fair to Dave I didn’t actually do what he asked which was remake the SNES version. He’d drawn up some example screens in screen mode 1 (320x256x4 colours) and the only one that I’ve used is the title screen.
Interestingly one of the forum members did find a leaflet from the “Activision Software Club” from winter 1984 that mentions that there will be producing versions for the “BBC Acorn, MSX and Amstrad home computers”. The MSX and Amstrad did get a version, so it seems the BBC Micro needed one. I would assume that – if the port was attempted at the time – the need to cater for the Electron as well probably made this much harder.
What were the hardest parts of the remake to achieve?
Probably fitting it all in. Writing for a retro system is an exercise in constrained programming and although there are various add-ons that give megabytes of memory and instant storage to my mind it doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of the original machines. Certainly, my later games can all be loaded from tape and work on a standard BBC B.
What that means in practical terms is you only have 32KB of memory (with – in the case of Ghostbusters – about 13.5K taken up by the screen display). Obviously, this is considerably less than the 64K on the Commodore original and even the 48K Spectrum.
I made good progress, but it became obvious that I wasn’t going to fit everything into a standard BBC B, so it becomes a matter of what you leave out. In the end, there are two versions – one for standard BBC B and one that uses “Sideways RAM” (A kind of RAM expansion that was available from various suppliers at the time). The later B+128 and Master machines had this as standard.
The cut-down version doesn’t have sampled sound or the ending screens. Also, the marshmallow man is smaller and the keymaster and gatekeeper don’t wander around the map, but I think it’s a reasonably faithful implementation.
I didn’t have access to any original source code (and I didn’t get on with disassembling another version) so I had to imply the gameplay based on playing it on other versions. Having said that because each of the versions for the different machines can be quite different, I felt justified in picking and choosing to make something that felt “right.” For example, the ending screens missing on the standard BBC B version means it is very similar to the ending that the CPC version has.
How did you create the graphics and music?
The music was actually one of the easier parts. There are various versions of the Ghostbusters theme on different “PD” discs from the 80s. I took one of the ones that I thought sounded the best and converted the player to assembler. The tune definitely isn’t the same quality as the C64 version (In particular it lacks the lead vocal line) but people seem to think it’s close enough.
The graphics were harder. You’ve got several different screens with various graphical “tiles” used to draw them. I wanted to have the map and the variety of different building styles that you got on the other versions as you played through. This is one of the examples where it would have been easier to simply load each of the screens from disk but a) this wouldn’t work on tape and b) there would be a significant pause every time you moved from screen to screen. As such there were several different techniques that I used to store the data.
For the houses, I got samples of each of the different house “types” from the C64 game and then wrote some code to go through the screens and identify the unique tiles for each house. I then have routines to draw these tiles which can be flipped or re-coloured as needed. Lookup tables for the top and bottom houses are then stored and a further table chooses which “half” of which house to use.
This isn’t the case for the finale screens – these are compressed as a single block with the lz02 compressor and decompressed into memory. A similar trick is used for the cars on the driving screens – although they are symmetrical so there are optimisations to be made there.
The compressor gets used a lot and almost none of the data is stored decompressed. The house drawing decompresses the tile data into an unused (at the time) area of the screen and then uses these tiles to draw the house.
How easy was it to replicate the sampled sound and the karaoke-style lyrics on the title screen?
These were quite straightforward. The sampled sound was a resample of a recording of the C64 version and I used some example code I found online. Again the only real consideration here is space. The in-game samples are not quite as good quality as they could be as I wanted to only use one Sideways RAM bank. If I’d used a second Sideways RAM bank, I could have improved the quality, but this gets further from the original hardware.
The lyrics use offsets in the tune. The tune is made up of a number of patterns so there is simply a list of patterns that the lyrics wait for and when they get there, I display a new line. The bouncing ball doesn’t follow the tune – it just starts at the beginning when the lyrics change so there was a bit trial and error to make it look right.
What are you currently working on?
No game currently. I’m fiddling with a Voxel landscape demo – but it’s just that – a demo. There’s no plan to turn it into any kind of game. There are a couple of ideas that I had that I might return to but I’ve not no solid plans at the moment.
Would you tackle any other conversions the BBC has missed out on?
Possibly. I’d have to have an interest in playing the game myself first – and it would probably need to include something I’d not done before.
REVIEWS
TONY: Montezuma’s Gold
Format: Atari 8-bit, C64, Amiga – digital & physical editions available
Credits: Monochrome Productions
Price: $9.99 digital download / physical version varies
Physical editions have been selling fast – a second batch of C64 cartridges and the 5.25” disk version along with the Amiga 3.5” disks are available from https://ka-plus.pl/ , while the Atari game (on cartridge or pen drive) is at https://retronics.eu
A memorable platform game thanks to its stylish graphics.
[Score] 90% - Retro Gamer Sizzler
Ami-H.E.R.O.
Format: Amiga (minimum A500 with 0.5Mb Chip RAM/0.5Mb Slow RAM)
Credits: Tukinem
Price: v1.0 free, v1.1 (with graphic update & fixes) $4.99 or more / floppy disk version £12.61 plus postage (K & A Plus)
Graphically, v1.1 does a good job. The moody background tune and sampled Thank You add to the atmosphere. A competent conversion that does not add anything in gameplay terms.
[Score] 75%
Flood
Format: ZX Spectrum (48K, supports Currah Speech)
Credits: Jonathan Cauldwell
Price: Free
The Choplifter-style premise is good fun; the speech helpfully shouts ‘Help’ when someone is being abducted. You may only keep playing to gain a high score, but Jonathan’s first Spectrum game since 2017 is fun while it lasts.
[Score] 71%
PROCESSING
Pascal Belisle combined Arkanoid with an RPG to create his NES game, The Trial of Kharzoid.
Pascal:
I tried to write a story that would make sense of the brick-breaking thing. It tells the tale of Kharzoid, an evil necromancer who made a game, a trial filled with traps and foes, for his own enjoyment. He gets more powerful each time a poor guy loses his soul in it. The hero sacrifices himself by being put into this trial, risking his soul. He has a grudge against the villain. I like revenge stories like The Count of Monte Cristo, and even the movie Running Man! I thought a revenge story would give the player a strong urge to continue playing.
Obviously, I was inspired by Arkanoid, Castlevania and Zelda, but I also took inspiration from other less-known games like Pinball Quest which combined pinball with RPG elements and Kirby’s Block Ball for the Game Boy, where I got the idea of using more than one paddle.
The brick-breaking genre is very old and widely used, but it's fun! It's a classic that a lot of gamers like to revisit from time to time. As far as I know, there are not a lot of them on the NES, let alone a gothic fantasy-themed one! So I thought I would fill the gap.
Although it has some RPG elements, it will be more like Zelda than Dragon Warrior. There are no stats like strength, intelligence or the like. Even the experience points displayed at the top of the screen act more like a classic ‘score’. I’m still trying to figure out how to integrate this XP/score mechanic. I will try to give the player a sense of progression in other ways.
There will be a lot of interaction with NPCs. The main one is the ghost of an elf character who was “sent to help”. She will appear from time to time to carry the story onward, a bit like Navi in Ocarina of Time. You will meet a lot of other characters, some will help you, and some will annoy you! Some will give you side-quests. But I have to keep myself from going off in all directions; it's a brick-breaking game after all!
One of the difficult things to design is the fact that the hero is a skull! He cannot carry a large inventory around! Where will he put that stuff?! Luckily, there is this thing called “suspension of disbelief” to help me out.
NOTE: Pascal provided a demo version with this text.
"The forest area and the temple are fully playable (you must find the Dash item to open the temple, you'll find it in the forest). There are some levels past the forest you can play, but the game might freeze or crash at this point.
Note that you cannot get rid of the pesky crow, it's a side quest for the full game I have yet to finish!
You can share the screenshot and footage you want. I'm doing everything by myself - music - graphics - coding, but I did use some royalty-free assets, and I got some help with the programming."
Since the article was written, the Kickstarter has been fully funded and production of the final game is underway.
kck.st/3VUnbik links to the Kickstarter page for a late pledge, and the itch.io page includes the demo - https://theoldgamemaker.itch.io/the-trial-of-kharzoid
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