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*                                                                             *
*   Game:   Rigor Mortis       Type:    Amstrad CPC Emulator DSK File         *
*   Author: Odiesoft           Webpage: http://www.odiesoft.de                *
*   Size:   2 * 194816 Bytes   Date:    29. Mai 2003                          *
*   File:   Odiesoft Games - Rigor Mortis Disc 1 (1995).dsk                   *
*                                                                             *
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Title: Rigor Mortis
Year:  1995

After we had finished Megablasters Rex wanted to start on a new game right away.
I was a bit sceptical whether I wanted to enter such a huge commitment again.
Megablasters had taken a great deal of time and effort and I wasn't sure if I
would be willing to do that all over again.

Nevertheless Rex and I developed the idea for a brutal beat em up game. We
intended to create the most brutal and bloody game on the CPC ever. It was meant
to be an unrestrained Zombie game. We wanted to fathom what was possible on the
CPC. At first I wanted to call the game "Zombie Massacre", but then Rex came up
with the idea to call it "Rigor Mortis" - which sounded a lot better and more
brutal than "Zombie Massacre".

We didn't really bother much about the story. The only thing we came up with was
something like that: you played a genetically engineered human being that was
meant to become an almost invincible, mindless killing machine. But once you
grew older you realized what the scientists had done to you and what you had
become. And now you want to take revenge on the whole humankind. So you flee
from the laboratory and search for the people who have done that to you.

So in each stage you played this Zombie and had to find and fight one of the
masterminds who were behind your torture and your existence: scientists,
managers, fund raisers for the company, etc... In each stage you would also face
the henchmen and defenders of these bad dudes as well as a number of innocent
citizens.

As I had stated above, we wanted to find out how far we can go with a game and
thus you were not only able to kill all the bad guys in this game, but also the
innocent people. And you would be rewarded for that as well!

At first the Zombie would only be able to defend himself with his hands, feet
and teeth. But during the game he would be able to pick up various objects that
he could use as weapons against his enemies: woodblocks, knifes, guns, a chain
saw, parts of dead bodies such as bones, feet or the bare spine with the head of
the victim at its end - didn't I say that we wanted the game to cross the line?

When you were armed with your arms and legs only we thought about various
methods how the Zombie could kill his prey: either just beat or kick it to death
or probably just rip it apart or tear the belly of an enemy open, so that the
bowels would come out, bite the head off or throw it to the ground and eat it
up. As a special idea I wanted to have a mother with her baby in a stroller walk
around. After the Zombie had finished up the mother he could jump the stroller
and tear the baby in it apart - I obviously hated kids at that time...

When the Zombie gets hit he was meant to fall apart bit by bit. That is if
somebody shot him in the chest, some parts of the chest and the back, where the
bullet left the body, would fall off and the bloody bones would gradually come
out with every consecutive hit. The same was supposed to happen to other parts
of the Zombies' body as well, like the head, which would become a bloody skull
or the arms and legs which would first start to show the bones beneath the skin
and after some time fall off, so that the Zombie wouldn't have arms to defend
himself anymore or would loose his legs, so that he could crawl on the floor
using his arms to move himself. Crawling at the floor he could only cut his
enemies down by tearing their feet apart or jump into them and throwing them to
the floor to have his way with them there.

Once the Zombie had killed somebody he would be able to eat parts of the dead
body to gain new strength and to restore lost body parts. For that Rex needed to
paint all the major body parts of the Zombie alone and I needed to write a
program that would create the Zombie character from the individual body parts in
their current state of decomposition. So when the Zombie lost a part of his body
the computer would create the new look of the Zombie for all the different
animation phases in the background and then the game could continue with this
changed graphics. The game may stalls for a second to allow the computer to make
the necessary changes to the character, but I figured that the players would
endure this pause to enjoy the various stages your Zombie could pass through in
this game.

I also started to work on a blood splatter routine so that every time anybody
was hit, beaten, kicked, bitten or torn apart fountains of blood would spray
from body and land on the floor, the walls and the other characters. I wanted
the game to be brutal, bloody and absolutely distasteful.

I also wanted to distribute the work differently this time. In Megablasters I
had to do a major chunk of the work since all the nice enemies Rex had drawn
needed to be furnished with some sort of artificial intelligence or at least a
nifty movement pattern to make them walk around and give you a hard time. But in
this game I wanted Rex to play a bigger role than me by painting lots and lots
of big and colorful enemies that needed more or less the same movement program:
search and attack the Zombie.

I created a double-buffered, overscan horizontal scrolling program in which a
preliminary version of the Zombie character could move to the left and right and
invoke the scrolling at the end of both screen sides. That is the screen
wouldn't scroll with every movement made, it would rather start scrolling when
you approached either end of the screen. I figured that this would give me and
the computer more time to animate the other characters and the blood splatter on
the screen, because scrolling new background into the visible area required some
calculation time that I wasn't willing to spend.

Besides that scrolling demo I also started to work on a simple BASIC program to
test my idea for the blood fountain routine. But I never got to finish this
program. The first test looked okay though, but I was entering my second year at
the University and I had just little time for the CPC left. So I told Rex that I
didn't think that I was able to finish the game and that I also thought it
wasn't worth the effort anymore and that I wanted to quit. Of course he wasn't
too happy about that, especially since he had created so much graphics already.
But without a programmer he wasn't able to continue this game and thus he
accepted my decision and turned towards different projects.

Besides the graphics Rex had painted and my scrolling and animation demo there
is another left over from this project: the graphics for the hidden game
Deadris. See here for more information on this weird Tetris clone...



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*                                                                             *
*   Game:   Deadris            Type:    Amstrad CPC Emulator DSK File         *
*   Author: Odiesoft           Webpage: http://www.odiesoft.de                *
*   Size:   1 * 194816 Bytes   Date:    13. January 2003                      *
*   File:   Odiesoft Games - Rigor Mortis Disc 2 (1995).dsk                   *
*                                                                             *
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Title: Deadris
Year:  1995


Deadris was essentially an idea of Rex. I once told him that I initially
intended to include a hidden game in Megablasters, but didn't had the time to
write it anymore since the release date forced me to finish the game early. So
Rex had the idea that we should remedy this flaw in our next collaboration: our
planned release "Rigor Mortis".

You know Rex kept sending me discs with ideas and designs for new graphics and
enemies for our upcoming game "Rigor Mortis". On one of these discs he had the
graphics for Deadris and he added a hand written document with information on
it.

So what's Deadris all about?

Basically it's a Tetris clone with a little twist or two. You have all the
regular tiles, e.g. the "L" piece, the small "T" piece, a cube, a line
consisting of four squares and the "s" piece. But different to Tetris these
pieces are not comprised of individual squares but are full color graphics that,
if assembled the right way, combine to look like a dead human body. That is all
these pieces are parts of this dead body, e.g. the head is the Tetris cube, the
legs are two different types of the "L" piece, the body is made up of the "T"
piece as the hip bone and the four square long bar as the spine, finally two
different "s" pieces form the arms of the body.

In line with the game "Rigor Mortis" Deadris was also meant to become very
bloody and disgusting. Instead of the jar in which the Tetris blocks would fall
we wanted to use an open coffin in which the body parts would fall from the top
of the screen.

All the pieces, falling as well as those that had already landed somewhere, were
meant to drip blood every now and then which would gather at the bottom of the
coffin. Once the final gap in a horizontal line was filled the line would
dissappear, almost like in the original Tetris. Just with the little difference
that it would disappear in a big splash of blood.

If you were able to assemble the full dead body by dropping all the parts at the
appropriate positions there was going to be some special event, like a jump to a
higher level or maybe some special animation or a digitized scream or something
like that - Rex and I hadn't really decided what would happen at this occasion.

Unfortunately, when I decided to discontinue the Rigor Mortis project Deadris
met its premature end as a consequence. For some time I thought that I might
continue with Deadris and release it as an individual game instead, but due to a
lack of time and a loss of interest in the CPC in general I didn't follow up
that matter.

The only existing evidence of Deadris are the two graphics screens Rex had
painted. No programming whatsoever had been done.


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*                                                                             *
* 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!                         *
*                                                                             *
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