Big_Mo

Yes, all the passages on one side of one screen always connect to the same screen on the other side. Glad the maze was of help!

You have to use teleporters because of the funky way the mazes work. Here is the image I am making the map from. Notice how the paths are kinda weird? http://home.att.net/~ataritimes/ADV-MAP1.GIF Gee, that map looks familiar... Oh yeah. That's cause I drew it!

"Contra-versial" sounds like a sequel to Contra. The word is "controversial", not "contraversial". The former is "a public argument or debate", the latter would be to deny something, or to turn something to the opposite side. --The book A Clockwork Orange was controversial. --Anakin Skywalker turning to the dark side will be contraversial" (so to speak!). [my two cents] That said, trying to make something controversial without having a point to make is artistic masturbation of the 1st magnitude. [/my two cents]

I look forward to seeing the winner and other entries. There's certainly an art to pixel-pushing, as I've come to realize more and more. My company does cell phone games so we're often dealing with resolution limits similar to old game systems, and I'm constantly surprised by how many artists I've seen whose art skills fall apart when they are forced to draw small. I'm going to try to attach a test sprite I did for the 5200...it's an 8x16 pixel image hat would have been composed of two overlaid sprites. I was trying to see what kind of animation I could get at that size. It's an 8 frame cycle.

Not too get too off-topic here, but, what happened was in 1997 I moved and took job at Psygnosis and during the first months or so after the move I had no time to look at the game. Then Kevin Horton, the programmer, came to visit, but by that point he lost interest. Too bad, because I think the game would have been a novelty in that it would have actually been funny. Would still like to do the game, but it's a monster and was going to use a 256Kbank-switched cart of Kevin's design. The game was going to have four completely different looking levels with varied play mechanics, a bonus round, and full screen reward and intro screens. Alas! The fun part was that it gave me an opportunity to excercise pixel-pushing skills I developed on my Atari 800XL. I even investigated doing some games for the 5200, and did tests of sprites and backgrounds for several, including an Adventure sequel, a twisted game with a Warlords type play mehanic with a control scheme optimized for the 5200 sticks, amongst others. Oh, and I also figured out a trick for moving graphics in sub-pixel increments in GTIA...but I'm sure no one wants to know how to do that.

...also, this reminds me, I was thinking of writing an article on designing graphics specifically for Atari systems, something on the order of the one I did for SIGgraph on the aborted ColecoVision title I was developing with Kevin Horton many moons ago. http://www.siggraph.org/publications/newsl.../molyneaux.html If anyone would be interested in such a thing say the word. I'd include a lot more figures than the article above.

I use Animation Shop 2, which came with the shareware PaintShop Pro program. I use it at work all the time.

I took a good look at the Castle screen and it appears that there are only about 24-26 unique characters used for the entire screen (that's just my professional ballpark). You clearly have an artist who understands how to work within limits (hard to find these days...trust me). The only thing I'd be concerned about is not having too much unique architecture from screen to screen, given the 5200's 128 unique character limit (and the "inverse" set only changes one color in that mode). Still, if you can hold to about the same # of characters for a unique screen, you could easily get 5 totally unique screens out of the character set without having to switch character data. Nice job.

DUH! Stupid me...I forgot the best way to check it... When I worked on the Sega DS9 game the programmers implemented a mode that allowed you to pause the game and then go to each color register and change the values there. In this way we could decide exactly what shade of what to use. You could do a build of Koffi that freezes the screen and make some simple left-right to select register up-down thing to change the values. Naturally, if you're doing a custom DL this could be not quite so straightforward but it might save you some time down the line.

Hey Cafeman. When I did tests for 5200 games I'd usually do it a mockup using a paint program on an Atari 8-bit computer hooked to a TV via RF. This way you can see what looks like that and which colors tend to bleed together. Course, I don't know that you want to get a whole Atari XL or whatever just to test colors!

My 15 minutes was a few articles in A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing Magazine. I had considerably longer fame in the ST world. At one Atari show people actually knew who I was on sight from my pictures in ST-Log magazine.

Five years ago I undertook the task of trying to map Indenture...I got quite a bit of it done, but I can't figure out what happened to the maps. I do remember I gave up after a point because the more I played the game the more I hated it. It was mostly endless screens of pointless maps, and it ended up being mostly just wandering and no real gameplay. If I ever find the maps I'll let everyone know. Did anyone ever figure out what all those objects and numbers in the game were for? For as much work as it took to get them, the payoff should have been terrific...but I suspect it wasn't.

Five years ago I undertook the task of trying to map Indenture...I got quite a bit of it done, but I can't figure out what happened to the maps. I do remember I gave up after a point because the more I played the game the more I hated it. It was mostly endless screens of pointless maps, and it ended up being mostly just wandering and no real gameplay. If I ever find the maps I'll let everyone know. Did anyone ever figure out what all those objects and numbers in the game were for? For as much work as it took to get them, the payoff should have been terrific...but I suspect it wasn't.