Post by alessandro on Feb 9, 2019 10:11:27 GMT
Hi fellas!
After the anticipation, a week ago, here it is - the second chapter of the princess-magician's story.
Two years have passed since Sophia defeated the evil wizard Yojar. The Emperor named her Princess, and her land became the autonomous Principality of Xixerella. Under her wise rule, the small region has become a haven of peace, prosperity and tolerance. But something obscure has already set its eyes upon it... Once again, Sophia, as the champion of her people, must face overwhelming perils and use every knowledge and skill she possesses, in order to defeat the new menace!
The game is essentially an enhanced remake of Matthew Smith's first title, Styx, which ran on the 16K Spectrum. And like Styx, it is divided into three parts. Each one of these is larger than the levels of Sophia, thus the two games are roughly the same size. However, while in Sophia the player's action did not vary across the levels, in Sophia II the action will be different:
- The first part, like in Styx, is a dungeon populated by monsters, which exit is guarded by the Spider Queen.
- The second, again like in Styx, is an underwater maze, with a boss invented by me at the end, the Giant Seahorse (Styx had no final enemy at this stage).
- Finally, in the third level, the player must reach the top of a tower, where the Grim Reaper, like in Styx, awaits.
Another difference with Sophia is that, in the best tradition of historical Spectrum games, the soundtrack is entirely composed with renditions of pieces of classical music, while in the previous game it was based upon folk tunes, with the exception of W.A. Mozart's Dies Irae for the final level.
Thanks to the efforts of Ersh and Bedazzle, game and documentation will be available in eight languages right from the start!
And now some technical details:
- This is the first time I employed AGD 4.7X (version 4Ke), albeit for just about 5% of the total work on the game proper. I also included a couple of scripts by Allan Turvey in order to avoid some occasional flicker to white of the coloured sprites, and to add more graphical detail to the third level, including conveyor belts.
- Graphic design for the dungeon was inspired by Binman's excellent work for Ghost Castle, while the bones were based on a graphic found in Gauntlet.
- For the second time - first one was in Seto Taisho Vs Yokai - there are not one, but two endings, although the second one is not hidden (i.e. you have to perform a certain action in order to access it), but can be chosen right from the Options menu through the difficulty level - another feature I implemented for the second time, after having introduced it in Apulija-13 V2.0.
- I improved AGD's native script for moving platforms, because it had the occasional tendency to let the player sprite "slip" through them in certain, albeit rare, occasions.
- The TR-DOS loading routines have been totally rewritten by employing the shadow ROM's system call to $3D13, thus allowing for smaller and faster code. I also had to find a way to make the disk versions compatible with the Brazilian clones of the Beta Disk 128 interface. After perusing the CBI-24's user manual, and some experimentation, I managed to do it.
But above all - I hope you will enjoy the new chapter of Sophia's adventures!
And if so, please vote for it in the ZX-Dev Remakes competition
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