BRAINSTORMING The Castles of Doctor Creep?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

I have been playing this great C64 classic quite a lot back then and started playing it again lately. Of course I soon wondered if it would be possible to port this little gem to the Atari 2600.

So I did some research in the web to gather some information. I found complete maps of the game and other resources. The latter includes the detailed file format which describes how each castle and room is created. It turns out that the numerous and quite complex room elements are defined by 40 x 25 raster units (RU), so that would fit perfectly to the Atari's playfield graphics. Of course the 2600 doesn't have the pixel and color resolution of the C64, so recreating the room elements will become quite tricky. Nevertheless as many elements as possibly should be defined with the playfield, to leave the sprites for the moving objects like the Player, Frankenstein, Mummy. Only if really necessary a few other elements (e.g. Ray Gun or Light Machine flashes) should use the sprites, but animating the playfield instead would be much preferred.

So here is the challenge for our most talented pixel artists. All you have is an asymmetrical playfield with one color per row (probably the row color pattern will repeat with the 25 vertical RUs). Can you do that? I'm curious about it.

 

I have attached a few sample screen shots.

[CDS Games]

Hm tough coming up with a color scheme for this. The simplest way is to have the floor rows one color and everything between the floors a second color.

 

One trick that may be worth looking into also is alternating the colors on each scan line. Then you can get effectively 2 different colored objects on the same horizontal, and if you're really clever in picking colors that blend you can actually have 3. (I had this trick on the C64 where I could stipple green and yellow on a multicolor character and they would blend almost seamlessly into a yellow-green that wasn't in the original palette).

 

Alternating purple and white seems to give a nice effect for the fireplaces and ladders, since skipping alternate bits just looks like part of their proper texture anyway (rungs & bricks). Although admittedly it kinda looks goofy for solid objects. Here's a quick attempt on a sprite editor. That's supposed to be one of the switches (?) above the fireplace. With better color choices it should be less stripey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[CDS Games]

Reading those links and watching game play and realizing how integral the different colors are to the game and map. Wow.