Jilly's Farm Volume 1... SokoBAArn

48K ZX Spectrum - 2017

Farmer Jack has retired, leaving the family farm to his daughter Jilly.  Jilly wants to keep livestock - pigs, sheep, and ducks - but there's still the gathering of the hay crop to be done...  Maybe the new sheep can help?

Last year I decide the one thing that I still wanted to write for the ZX Spectrum was an isometric game.  Having been a teenage in the 80's I witnessed with amazement what Ultimate had done with Knight Lore, and what Costa Panayi and Ritman & Drummond (amongst others) subsequently did, and the look of those games has always stayed with me

So I started working on an engine, which turned into a test of a player object pushing other objects around, which looked a lot like Sokoban... The player has since become a sheep, the objects bales of hay, and so SokoBAArn was born.  Isometric is perhaps not the best viewpoint for such a game, but I like it, and watching that sheep walking around sure is fun :)

Two of my previous games - W*H*B and X=Y=Z - have both featured levels created by other people, and so I thought I'd take that a step further with this game and provide a full-working level editor within the game, which produces a 25-character code which anybody can then type into the game in order to play that level.  This, along with the 30 levels built into the game, should at least provide a brief distraction to the woes of the world