*******************************************************************************
*                                                                             *
*   Game:   The Enchanted Forest  Type:    Amstrad CPC Emulator DSK File      *
*   Author: Odiesoft              Webpage: http://www.odiesoft.de             *
*   Size:   1 * 194816 Bytes      Date:    16. May 2003                       *
*   File:   Odiesoft Games - The Enchanted Forest (1991).dsk                  *
*                                                                             *
*******************************************************************************

Title: The Enchanted Forest
Year:  1991


When I started to create this game I was obviously playing "Get Dexter" (Crafton
et Xunk) a lot, since the main character of this game bears a huge similarity to
the Xunk character of that particular game.

This "enchanted forest" was supposed to become a vertical scrolling fantasy
adventure game where you had to collect items and walk the individual levels all
the way to the end, trying to overcome obstacles and avoid dangers. Besides the
familiar looking main character I've also designed a number of enemies which I
usually named using their main color, e.g. "the blue one", "the yellow one", ...
just the rhinocerus was called "rhinocerus", because it looked like one.

I was particularly proud of the rhinocerus I drew, because I thought it was very
well painted. Later I figured out that the rhinocerus may look okay when it was
standing still, but as soon as it started to walk you saw the obvious flaws of
that design. The rhinocerus didn't walk on the screen, it "moonwalked", i.e. its
feet never left the ground. The rhino just slides forward instead of walking.

I also drew the background graphics. For the horizontal scrolling I even created
a two way parallax scrolling with a fast moving foreground and a slower moving
background image with a mountain and a moon. This was accomplished by creating a
double buffer image in the invisible background where first the background image
was painted over the image from the last frame and then the new foreground was
painted over the background. I always thought looked really cool when the moon
was peaking through the branches of the dead tree. While painting the graphics I
took some inspiration not only from "Get Dexter" but also from the Sorcery
games. Just look at the roof of the well!

The border around the screen and the various score boards were painted before
the game starts using cursor characters. Since the Amstrad CPC wasn't able to
draw multicolor cursor characters three characters in different colors were
painted at the same location in order to create a multicolored border around the
various fields and the playing area.

I ran into the first problems when I thought about how I can create a program
that determines where platforms start and end and where the chracters of this
game can walk and at what point they would fall off a platform. I thought I
could somehow test that on the screen. I tried to look for bytes that were
unique to the platforms. But soon I had to discover that this approach wouldn't
work. I was running the risk that the characters in the game would start to walk
on and in other elements of the game like in the roof of the well or in the
branches of the tree.

I thought about possibilities to do the detection of start and end points of
platforms, etc. on the map in the memory, but the representation of the objects
in the memory wasn't really standardized. I was able to put any number of
elements in one spot in the memory and thus had unequal element-sizes in each
position in the map.

Furthermore the background graphics I had created was way to colorful. If the
character wasn't moving it was hard to distinguish between the background and
the foreground graphics.

So facing all these problems that couldn't be solved easily I decided to try
something else and abandoned this project. Also I thought that the main caracter
looked too much like Xunk from "Get Dexter" and that I'll probably run into
legal problems.


*******************************************************************************
*                                                                             *
* This program can be distributed freely and without the need of a written    *
* of a written permission by Odiesoft, as long as it is distributed free of   *
* charge!                                                                     *
*                                                                             *
* If you had to pay for this, you've been ripped off!                         *
*                                                                             *
*******************************************************************************

