79 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
79 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
Peasant's Quest for the Apple II:
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Taking a 2000s Flash Game Back to the 1980s
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Peasant's Quest is a Flash-based adventure game designed by
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the creators of the Homestar Runner website and released in 2004.
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The game has a retro-feel, designed to look like Sierra adventure games
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from the 1980s such as King's Quest. In this talk I'll describe
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taking the game and de-making it to an actual system from the 1980s:
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an Apple II with 64k of RAM. I'll describe the various challenges
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I encountered along the way, mostly the Apple II's horrible high-res
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graphics mode as well as trying to cram all of the content into 64k of
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RAM while maintaining a low amount of floppy-disk swapping during gameplay.
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Demakes
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HGr-MIST
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HGR
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(horrible hgr)
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Backgrounds
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AGI-like? They abandoned it. Would save space
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HGR Graphics
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pink line on left of screen (picture)
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Priority backgrounds, like AGI
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+ load at $400, lo-res
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+ Can't use screen holes tricky (original Apple II 4k of RAM
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so need to put slot info in first 4k)
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Sprites
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easier in blocks 0f 7
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still have to rotate 1 pixel for odd columns
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transparency a pain with color clash
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Animations
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too big?
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Mini-games?
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Text
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HGR drawing lib (no built in on 2)
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How to fit? Lookup for common word distribution?
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Using high-bit terminated strings rather than nul in some cases
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think original auto-wraps text, do it manually
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VERB/NOUN parsing is more or less good enough
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could use object "PUT BABY IN WELL"
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a few places. cheat?
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PUT PEBBLES IN WELL vs
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PUT PEBBLES IN BUCKET vs
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PUT BABY IN WELL
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Have to distinguish LOOK AT WELL/LOOK IN WELL
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how many verbs/nouns?
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Ram-map
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keyboard: (picture)
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no up/down arrows
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Music
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Mockingboard, pt3 player
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no mockingboard, electric duet, but can't do more than
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page flip (missing flame). Worth it?
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Speech
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Can we do SAM? 9k?
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SSI-263 but unobtanium
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Disks:
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Fitting on disk.
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swappign fun for nostalgia, not so much when actually playing
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