I, Ball Clone

Scrolling test with cross hair and some objects

Well anyway, the Spectrum game I wanted to convert was a precursor to Lemmings. In this game an air-filled ball was jumping through a horizontally scrolling maze on the screen. The player had to move plates and floor tiles into the way of the ball, so that it wouldn't fall off, land on sharp peaks, jump into a fire or other obstacles.

Inside a cave with some obstacles

I've read about that game in the famous German CPC computer games magazine ASM. I've never actually seen the game, but reading the review was sufficient enough to get me hooked on that idea. As far as I know there wasn't an official CPC conversion of that game. When I started to do my own version there certainly wasn't a CPC conversion available or announced.

Since the ball was supposed to hop step by step at regular intervals I figured that using interrupts to do the scrolling would be a good idea. I thought that this would leave more time for the painting of the ball and the hair cross that the player can use to move the plates. Since I didn't use double buffering the hair cross was flickering a lot every time the screen scrolled one step, but this was slight enough to be bearable.

The level editor for this game.

Besides a small program with which I could do test runs with the interupt controlled scrolling, I wrote an editor to draw the map for the game.

While I'm writing these lines I still can't figure out why I discontinued this program. I wasn't the best game I wrote, but I think it would have made up a nice game for a cover tape of a CPC magazine or so. Well, maybe it was that the scrolling wasn't really this smooth, or that the hair cross flickered a little or that I was afraid that the game would become a lot slower as soon as I added the ball. Or I just started a different project and forgot about this game. I really don't remember.

So this idea is just another addition to the array of unfinished projects of mine.