AY-up & leaving the nest

Being a 128K-only game means that, really, it must have some good music & SFX, given the AY chip available in all the 128K machines.  Personally I'm terrible at music & SFX, but luckily I've two major things helping me with it in this game.  The first is the original Ultimate Play The Game titles to reference - specifically Atic Atac & Knight Lore.  Those give me the template for the beeper-based effects for the footsteps, eating food, etc.  The second major help is that the musician of the desktop version of the game - Alberto Gonzalez - is also kindly doing the music for this conversion.  We've got one tune in the game already, and there's hopefully another 3 to come, maybe more if the memory allows.  I've been playing the game for some time though with just the one tune looping around and it's so good I'd easily let it ship with just that playing.

In order to free up as much space as possible for the tunes I've been working through the code and tidying up what I can where it won't impact on the speed of the game.  The usual speed/size constraint is always present in working within such tight memory, but I've managed to squeeze some more out of it, and even found a bit of speed in a couple of places as well - so that's a win/win all round.

The other thing that happened recently is major - the game had it's first journey beyound the confines of this laptop.  A version was sent to Richard Jordan & Craig Stevenson - the programmer & artist of the desktop version - and luckily for me they both liked the progress so far, which is a big weight lifted from my shoulders.  I've been living with this game for some time now, working in a vacuum without anybody else seeing it, and I've constantly been aware that it's not as fast or as capable as the original, despite working very hard to try and overcome that.  However, I need to remember that this is for a Spectrum, a machine which is over 40 years old and of very limited means.  Distancing myself from the project and going back and playing some of the legendary 3D title which the machine spawned, and the comments from Richard & Craig, made me much happier with what I'd managed to produce so far.  Onwards & upwards!