Mars Intro

A green Mars? There must be something wrong...

The idea was pretty simple: I wanted to have more animation on the screen besides a scrolling text. I just had figured out that there are two possible ways to display a sprite: in front of everything or behind the background. To accomplish that I just had change a simple comparison; If I wanted to display something before the background I had to test within the sprite data if a byte contained points or was empty, to display the sprite behind the background I had to do the same test on the background instead of the sprite data.

Some time before thinking about creating this intro I've read a science fiction magazine where the cover showed the view of the Earth from some settlement on Mars. I did not find this science fiction magazine anymore, but I had the picture (or maybe a similar picture) vivid enough in my mind so that I painted the picture from my memory.

The program I used for drawing the picture was very crude. Besides drawing dots and lines there weren't any other features. So it took a long time to paint it and at some point I lost the interest in finishing it. Thus I've left the ground blank without any structure or crags. Also I didn't really care much for the shadows of the mountains, only the tent and the craters near the lake have shadows on the ground and the liquid.

The elliptical path of the moon was calculated with a simple BASIC program that used COS and SIN commands to approximate points on the screen for the path of the Moon around Earth.

Drawing fonts often is a pain in the butt, so instead of creating a completely new font for the scroll text I used an enlarged system font and added a border around it to make it look better. Also I made the font change color to be more salient.

There is no music in this demo. Composing music is one of those things I absolutely suck at doing. I also hadn't started ripping music from games I liked and the Soundtrakker wasn't even conceived yet. So I was left with the option to create a really bad music with standard system commands or have no music at all. For apparent reasons I chose the latter option.

Having finished this intro I didn't know what to do with it. I wasn't yet part of the CPC scene and most of my friends were just interested in trading games. I kept the demo on a disc thinking I might release it some day, but after my name started to become familiar to the other sceners due to the rare software effects I conceived I figured I couldn't release such a medicore intro to this audience anymore.

So this is the premiere for the Mars Intro, 14 years after it was written...