Gauntlet Of Power

Initial Thoughts.

 Heroes Of Loot : Gauntlet Of Power is another game by Pascal at OrangePixel. 

I was on the lookout for another game to convert after finishing Meganoid. 
GoP is a similar sort of roge-like to Heroes Of Loot, but it's room based. 

My HoL conversion pre-created random levels on the PC side, but for this I wanted to actually do it all on the Genesis. 
Having looked in to the Level Generation code, I really didn't fancy converting that to asm. Nothing hard about it, but it's a *lot* of code, and there's massive room for tiny logic errors in the conversion. I didn't want to spend months in the future tracking down subtle little bugs.

So, Pascal very generously allowed me to take the gfx and make a similar game to the original, but not necessarily sticking with exactly how the original works.

From me feeling quite down about the original conversion task, I'm now on quite a high. This is the first time for a few games that I'll be able to make changes which work in the Genesis's favour. I can write to the hardware again! 

This opens up lots of possibilities for compromise which should make this version better than the strict conversion could ever have been.

The first change which comes to mind immediately is to use fixed sizes for the game rooms. (eg. 512x256) rather than a bunch of different sizes as in the original. (I can still make smaller rooms, but this would be the max. size). Something like this would immediately get rid of the need for updating scroll edges, saving 10 scan lines or so of CPU / VBL which can be used elsewhere, without really anyone noticing anything different!
 

 

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