Eek! Monsters!!

Sorry, bit overdue with this.  Been meaning to write for a while, but kept making more changes and so pushing it back.  Anyway, here now.

For some years now - pretty much since I first got the game running - the monsters which spawned and ran around the place were all placeholder, very obviously stolen from Knight Lore, and so an update was long overdue.  And so back to the PC version I went, and added the required graphics for 7 different enemies, and very lovely they look too, even though they are downgraded to monochrome.  Since then I've mostly been optimising stuff, as the updated graphics are larger than the placeholder, and so slow everything down.  Most Spectrum games will spend the majority of their time drawing graphics, as there is no hardware support, and this game is certinaly no exception.  There's not a huge amount I can do with the actual drawing, as it has to deal with shifting and mirroring the graphics as it goes, which is costly, but I felt that some of the surrounding code could be better.  For example - since the beginning of the project the game has had a list of object to draw, and a list of objects to check for collisions - but the two lists actually had the same contents, only that the draw list is sorted to maintain the illusion of depth.  So the collision list was binned, and the draw list used for both cases.  Not only does that free up the memory for that list, but also the processing of adding and removing items from it.  I've also been making various small changes all over the place, which won't do any great wonders for speed or memory use, but as a certain supermarket brand says, every little helps.

I did find a little time to actually play the game as well, having been given some solutions from the PC version.  I shouldn't sound so amazed, but I could take a character and their PC-based route through the game and complete it!  Every objects was where it should be, and the doors all of the correct types, and it all just worked!!

Around this time every year I'm asked if it's going to be released in time for the Speccy's birthday - the 23rd April - and this year the answer will be the same as previously, no, but I am still hoping for sometime this year.  I am aware though that I haven't released any new images or footage from the game, so am intending of getting a new video of the game running out soon.