Today we return to remixing through a choice that, somehow, I’m expecting to receive only a luke-warm reception. Despite being one of the more prolific arrangers out there in the last few years, Instant Remedy seem to be rather underappreciated. Hopefully I can persuade you to give them a look. If you like what you hear below, check out all of their productions over on their homepage - it’s well worth it!

Zolyx’s Game Music Monday #17:
Instant Remedy – Last Ninja – The Wastelands (Extended Version)

From the second those iconic ninja eyes fade into view the discerning viewer will recognise that the song I’ve picked is from 8-bit masterpiece Last Ninja. The Commodore 64 version was produced almost completely by a Hungarian team known as SoftView at the request of Mark Cale, the boss of System 3. They were never credited for it – allegedly at their own request – and nor were they paid for their efforts. Considering the success that their game enjoyed, this seems most unjust. For many it must feature high on list of the best games of all time, on any platform.

Enjoy the track and be sure to tune in next week for another trip back in time!

The latest post on the Guilds Wars 2 blog confirms that the waiting game is nearly over, confirming a full release for their eagerly awaited title some time in 2012. They also say that after a press-only beta next month, future testing events will be “aggressively ramped up” from March onwards. Cor! After five years of anticipation, it’s all starting to kick off!

Best get to polishing those applications, folks. It’s going to be one of the hottest tickets of the year…

Back in time we go, way back to the happy ol’ year of 1987 – a time when the Commodore 64 was in its heyday, Mastertronic was as close to a household name for budget gaming as you could get, and bedroom coders were busily programming their way towards innovating the next fantastic game.

It’s debatable whether Energy Warrior falls into the exact category of “fantastic”, but I’d say the music is more than good enough to deserve a listen. This is the original title theme as composed by Andy Grimson (according to Lemon, at least… and who am I to prove them wrong?).

Zolyx’s Game Music Monday #16: Andy Grimson – Energy Warrior

I particularly like the punchy start and creative use of unconventional drum sounds, and for me it ranks up there as one of the most memorable tunes of the C64 era. I wonder if the SID chip’s designers ever thought that three channels and some noise would be the source of such fond reminiscing all these years later…

Anyhow, I bid you farewell until next time, SID-heads!

Here we find ourselves on another Monday full of dreariness and possibly even despair. But push whatever ails you out of your mind for just a few minutes and enjoy another retrolicious remixed track from two people you’ve probably never heard of before in your life! Apple is the fine person to have rearranged the original composition from Blair Zuppicich. And, er, no… we’re not talking about that Apple. Oh no. Certainly there are no apps or music playing devices in this post, except for the cunning Flash wotsit through which you can enjoy the tune on YouTube, right below these very words…

Zolyx’s Game Music Monday #15: Apple – Cybernetix

If the image wasn’t enough of a clue, let me tell you that this comes from an old but excellently polished Amiga title called Cybernetix: The First Battle. I seem to remember it being similar to Transplant – another game with great music that someone really needs to remix – in that all you had to do was kill all of the aliens in each level. In this game, however, there is no nausea-inducing screen rotation, just good ol’ fashioned wraparound horizontal scrolling. Pretty standard fare for 1992, really, but packaged up and presented quite professionally by the author, Paul Andrews. Some credit should also go to Rodney Smith for the game’s artwork.

Where are they now, eh? I will leave you to ponder that thought until next week’s thrilling episode!

Anyhow, the Unnamed Dejenol Demake Project has reached its second milestone and was considerably more work than I expected – I hope this doesn’t set a trend! As the project is still moving forward steadily enough I want to spend a little more time blogging about my progress than I’ve done with my other projects in the past. Yet this is also a slightly scary event, considering I can’t guarantee the project will ever see the light of day, and I’m wary of getting people’s hopes up (even the whole 2 of you who may be at all interested in this ). Maybe the aura of disappointment I spun at the cancellation of Return to Dejenol – nngh, there, I said it – has made me too cautious…

Ultimately, though, what’s the point of hobby-coding if you can’t gush enthusiastically to the world about what puny triumphs you’ve made? It’s about time I started dishing the dirt on what this project might become, and based on past experience and my current level of experience, what features it will and will not have.

Click through the break and let us begin a journey through a +1 wall of text!

It begins with a dream: A vision of an RPG game that reaches back in time to capture the essence of sublime, mid-90s nostalgia, and forwards to preserve it by forging a game more flexible, more intuitive, and more playable than before. The notion of Mordor: Return to Dejenol was born. But see… after glowing brightly, the dream falters and stumbles; slowly but inevitably it collapses into itself under the weight of its own ambition. The memory fades…

…but not entirely, for it is still remembered well enough to illustrate a point. The most important thing I am keeping in mind for this new project is to start small and grow, just as I did with Millenipede. Do not obsess over that which is unimportant. Get it playable, then refine later if need be. With that in mind, here is what I tentatively expect the limits and features of this attempt to be:

• Style the game as a “demake”, with low-resolution graphics and a relatively small set of game content
• Create a storyline that is acceptable to Mordor lore-junkies but explains the game’s primitiveness
• The game will be single-player, with no consideration given to online play
• You will likely control only one character, rather than a party of four, though this may change
• There are no monster companions, nor is there a Confinement in the town
• There are no guilds, as such; the character may pick “perks” at regular points to diversify their skills
• There will probably not be any magic in the first version
• No more than 3 or 4 dungeon levels to explore
• Don’t bother to hide game data in obscure files – store and edit predefined information in plain text

So, already we’re chopping out a good chunk of stuff, for better or worse. Also moved off the drawing board for now is the idea of having individual “user accounts”, each with their own individual knowledge of the dungeon, shop stock, and characters. It’s something I want to put in eventually but after there’s a game for it to fit onto.

Limiting the game so tightly is quite important – it drastically increases my chances of success! If the project becomes playable then it will mean there is a solid base to build from. While I may not be adding things like guilds or monster companions yet, I’m not forgetting their importance for later – I’m trying to design the game in such a way that these features can be added without the need for refactoring (or, in non-gobbledegook, without having to put the code through an industrial shredder and start from scratch).

So far, Milestone 1 has “put something on the screen” by displaying the dungeon and allowing the “party” to walk around. This only involved a re-jigging of existing code from Dalyn’s Quill and so didn’t take an awful lot of effort. But a couple of days ago I got to a stage where I was happy to call Milestone 2 done, and a good deal of code which didn’t exist before is now thrumming away happily:

• A simple file handler was created to read data from a plain text file
• “Monsters.txt” was created and holds at least one monster per spawn type
• The data structure for dungeon spawn areas was expanded to allow actual monster encounters
• Areas will populate themselves correctly from defined monsters, based on area spawn types
• Monsters of the same type and level can be weighted so that some are more commonly picked than others
• The screen now shows what monsters are in a room

Soon after capturing the video for M2 I decided the existing 8px monster portraits weren’t going to cut it, so they’ve since been increased to 32px (David E. Gervais tiles, yay!). I’m still fiddling with the exact encounter display layout – you’ll probably be able to see the results in the next vlog.

For the near future these newly-generated terrors of the underworld will be able to live without fear of being turned into experience fodder for the character – combat isn’t scheduled until M4. Meanwhile, what is to be done? The third important step is to make the game understand the concept of “OMG epic lootz, neeeeed!!” and have UIs added to show the player’s inventory and their stats. In view of the limited 320×240 screen space, this is where I will also try to create a tooltip system to summarise an item’s stats as the player hovers the mouse cursor over its icon, removing the need for a separate “info” pane like the other Dejenol games have used. Given my tendency to nitpick over such things, I must try to restrain my perfectionist instincts and make something reasonable without taking weeks over it!

That’s all I’ll say for now, but as long as the bits of rust keep flaking off the cogs that struggle to bring this project to life, I’ll try and keep up the more open style of blogging about whatever progress there may be. If you’ve enjoyed this random outpouring of words then my job here is done! Should you have any constructive criticism then please, let me know it – pretty much anything and everything will act as motivation for me to continue onward.

I shall see you at our next meeting, when perhaps the project may actually get a name…

So, on to business we go. My pick today is just a single one of the many remix productions of Sebastian Bachliñski, aka moog. Arguably the most prolific musician of the last 5 years in the scene, his portfolio on remix.kwed.org spans over thirty pieces of music, and all of them are rated either “very good” or “excellent”. He knows his art, that’s for sure. This is the first track of his that I’ve featured and, you know, I rather think there’ll be others as the year rolls on…

Zolyx’s Game Music Monday #14: moog (Sebastian Bachliñski) – Rubicon Title 98

The song comes from Rubicon, a game released in 1991 by 21st Century Entertainment, with the music being composed originally by Jeroen Tel of the legendary Maniacs of Noise. Yep – he’s the same man who created possibly the greatest piece of C64 SID music ever for Cybernoid 2… but that’s a story for another Monday. Meanwhile, this track isn’t too shabby either, so I hope you enjoy it and be sure to tune in next week for some more of the good stuff!

I’m nearly done with Milestone 2, and possibly might have had it nailed today were it not for the aforementioned editor malfunction. Tomorrow I intend to finish defining debug monsters for each of the 18 spawn types – as close as I am to nearly being able to list all of the categories off the top of my head, I’ll spare you the detail – and then, I can crosswire the now-properly-loading dungeon spawn area IDs into the part which keeps track of all the monster spawning, and finally the dungeon will be rid of the Random Monster army!

And after that? A change of pace. Items! And a way to look at how awesome they are! And perhaps if I use enough exclamation marks in this sentence, I can persuade myself that interface design is fun after all! Yeeaah… no. Not happening.

What? You don’t think it’ll catch on? BAH. I’d argue the point but a whole flock of Strange Creature 73 has just flown up my trouser leg, so do excuse me a moment…

To elaborate on what’s done today: A decent amount, yet not as much as I hoped. I spent far too long iterating the layout of what I am calling the “encounter panel”, but I think this present design uses space nicely enough for the time being. As you can see, I’m using the Oryx tileset (otherwise known as the retro coder’s best friend) since it’s just so easy to work with and is pretty much the best free set of graphics out there right now. I don’t mind that they’ve been used in so many other things – they can be replaced later if needed and it’s way better than looking at dull placeholder squares. Oh, and I know it doesn’t have chests yet; they’re in a later Milestone.

All that remains before Milestone 2 is complete is to finish getting the spawn areas to randomly populate – by which I mean they won’t take account of what monster spawn types (humanoid, insect, devil, etc.) the dungeon file says should actually appear in any given location. Then it’s just a case of actually feeding that “real” data to the encounter panel. Easy! Except it probably won’t be.

To temper my own excitement as well as any you, dear reader, might be feeling, I should say that I’ll update as often as I feel there’s something interesting to mention. With Christmas around the corner, updates may be less regular, but we’ll see how it pans out.