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*                                                                             *
*   Game:   Megablasters       Type:    Amstrad CPC Emulator DSK File         *
*   Author: Odiesoft           Webpage: http://www.odiesoft.de                *
*   Size:   6 * 194816 Bytes   Date:    26. July 2003                         *
*   Files:  Odiesoft Games - Megablasters Disc 0 (1994).DSK                   *
*           Odiesoft Games - Megablasters Disc 1 (1994).DSK                   *
*           Odiesoft Games - Megablasters Disc 2 (1994).DSK                   *
*           Odiesoft Games - Megablasters Disc 3 (1994).DSK                   *
*           Odiesoft Games - Megablasters 4 Player (1993).DSK                 *
*           Odiesoft Games - Nitro original (1992).dsk                        *
*                                                                             *
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Title: Megablasters
Year:  1994


In Megablasters you and your friend can take control of Bob and Bart, two young
boys who have to rescue their kidnapped twin brothers in order to save the
world. You will have to conquer at least 9 different worlds, blowing away
countless enemies and survive many adventures in order to win the game!

This is the story its creation...

It's always best to start at the beginning: At its beginning Megablasters wasn't
meant to become such an enormous game, it wasn't even meant to become a
commercial game at all. It all started in 1991 when my brother got a copy of the
game "Dynablasters" for his Amiga 500.

In "Dynablasters" you could either play a story mode alone or fight up to 4
friends in the battle mode. I tried my luck with the story mode a couple of
times, but we had the greatest fun playing the battle mode, especially with a
lot of players. The more, the better.

At some point this also got boring. The battles were over very quickly, you had
barely enough time to collect some extras to gain an advantage over your
opponents. I found that a big drawback. In my opinion the playing area was too
small - the walls that separated you from your opponents were gone very quickly
and then you had no other choice than to fight one another. So I had the idea to
create a conversion of the battle mode on the CPC and remedy all these
disadvantages.

I just wanted to create a battle mode, nothing more, nothing less.

At that time I wasn't aware of the fact that "Dynablasters" was also just a
clone of a video game called "Bomberman" which had its origin in a game of the
same name on the rather unsuccessful MSX line of personal computers. I would
find that out some months later, but for the moment I was content with the idea
to create my own conversion of "Dynablasters"...

I started out by deciding to use the overscan technique to create a huge playing
area. Additionally I selected the CPC four color Mode 1 for the graphics, so
that I could have detailed graphics in very small space. Unfortunately using the
overscan mode left little main memory for the graphics (the game screen was
double buffered so that the animation wouldn't flicker). That meant that the
main characters shouldn't have too much animation if any animation at all. I
figured that if the main characters would be balls there was no need for
animation.

Emoticons hadn't been invented at that time and I wasn't good at painting
graphics at all. So when it came to giving the characters faces I tried to paint
some for a while, but all these attempts looked so terrible that I arrived at
the compromise to cover their faces up somehow. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
show and games were very popular at that time and I thought, "Well they have eye
bandages and the fans love them, so why don't I give my characters also some
facial cover". Thus the spherical main characters wear bandannas over their
faces...

To give the game a somewhat cartoonish look I drew a funny dying animation where
the character is blowing to ashes which falls to the ground, leaving the eyes
standing still for a moment before they fall on the heap of ashes. I thought
that since the characters themselves doesn't offer much for good or at least
funny looks this animation (which was easier to draw than a funny looking face)
would compensate for that.

The basic game was finished after a few weeks. Actually I was eager to finish
it, because I intended to go to the GOS Party 4 in Bad Hersfeld in 1992 and I
wanted show the game to the other CPC freaks there. This decision was going to
change the course of game almost completely...

The game was accepted very well by the other users. Actually one of the other
freaks (whom I didn't know at that time) approached me and asked me whether I
wanted to make a commercial game out of this battle only game. The name of this
CPC freak was Kangaroo and he was the owner of a small company called "New Age
Software". He also distributed BSC's SoundTrakker which soon became the standard
CPC music editing software.

I told him that I would think about his offer and would stay in contact with
him. Some weeks later I told him that I accepted his offer and would add a story
mode to the game.

I redesigned the graphics of the whole game and switched from the four color,
high resolution screen mode to a 16 color, reduced resolution screen mode. I had
to reprogram the source code to pay heed to this change. While doing this I also
added a sound effects routine, since the original Mode 1 version didn't play any
explosion or other sounds at all.

As soon as the new four player mode was finished I sent it to Kangaroo to get
his opinion. He was quite impressed with the changes I had made to the game and
wrote a short piece of music that I was able to add as background music to my
game. His music underpinned the action very well and since my sound effects
routine used just one of the CPC's three music channels to play the "boom" and
"bang" sounds, these effects incorporated nicely with Kangaroo's three channel
music.

Actually he was so enthusiastic that soon after getting the new four player mode
he started to place ads for the game in the last remaining 8bit computer
magazine in Germany: the legendary Computer Flohmarkt.

In my opinion this wasn't such a good idea. First of all I was far from being
ready with the game (it took me almost another 12 months to finish the battle
mode alone) and secondly the game still had the rather cumbersome working title
"Caution! Explosives". I thought up this title to dissociate my game as best as
possible from the Amiga version ("Dynablasters") and the original MSX version
("Bomberman"). An alternative title I had thought of for my game was
"Megablasters", but at first I was afraid to use a name that bore so much
resemblance with the Amiga game title. In the end I threw all doubts over board
and decided to go with the latter name, since the former just sounded so awkward
and clumsy.

Secondly I heard some rumors that Prodatron and Kangaroo got into a fight over
supposedly late or insufficient payments from New Age Software for his
Digitrakker Software. Also there were other rumors that BSC and Kangaroo had
some disagreement on the payment. Since I knew Prodatron and BSC longer and
better than Kangaroo (at that time) I trusted their judgment and thus became
convinced that I shouldn't have New Age Software publish my game but rather
publish it myself.

You can imagine that Kangaroo wasn't very happy about that and wanted me to
reimburse him for the ads that he had put into the Computer Flohmarkt. This led
to some discussion. Suffice to say that Kangaroo and I are still friends and
that I didn't get rich by selling my game by myself. I never found a real French
distributor, so unfortunately Chany took over that job for me...

In Great Britain a penpal of mine, Rob Buckley from Radical Software, took over
the UK distribution of Megablasters. He sold some copies (more than I did) and
in exchange I tried to sell three games from Radical Software (Fluff, Star
Driver and Masters of Space) for him - though I wasn't very successful with this
undertaking.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before I could start to distribute the game, I
needed to finish it. And from the four player battle mode it was still a long
way to the finished game with 10 worlds and lots of enemies.

I hadn't yet found a graphics artist for my game and after my disagreement with
Kangaroo I also had lost my music composer. A replacement for the latter was
quickly found: Crittersoap, the son of Marabu from the HJT stood in for Kangaroo
and composed the rest of the music for my game.

On the BENG Euromeeting 2 in Wuppertal in 1993 I found somebody who was eager to
paint graphics for demos and games and was just waiting for the right offer: Rex
of BENG! We just needed to talk very little and he was all ablaze with ideas for
enemies, end-of-world bosses and backgrounds needed for the game.

After the BENG Euromeeting 2 Catloc and he (both were from Greece) stayed at my
place for another 9 or 10 days and besides finishing a small intro we had begun
on the Euromeeting (the Skull intro) we started to work on the details for the
different worlds of Megablasters. Having returned to Greece he spent some weeks
working busily on the graphics and sending me discs with new enemy graphics and
some hand written scripts on the abilities of these enemies.

The "only thing" I needed to do was to create the program that would animate
these enemies and give them some artificial intelligence or at least a more or
less sophisticated movement scheme. That may sounds simple, but it is far from
that. It took me around eleven more months to write the subroutines for all the
89 enemies, program a disc loading system (so that the game was able to reload
each level from the floppy disc), design an intro and create the main menue with
several options, submenus and the two hidden cheat modes.

I won't go into the details of this incredible programming effort. Suffice to
say that I spent several hundreds of hours in front of my CPC to finish the
program before no one was interested in it anymore - you know in 1993 a lot of
people had already left the CPC and with each week some more turned their backs
on this 8bit Computer. Since I wanted my game to be successful, publicly as well
as comercially, I had to speed up, in order to reach as many of the remaining
CPC users as possible.

After writing the routines for all the enemies and different levels I started to
create the main menue, the intro and the end sequence. Writing the programs for
these features wasn't much fun anymore. I was pretty burned out after creating
one enemy controlling routine after the other - it was like I was an assembly
line worker under a strong deadline pressure. I had the best intentions for the
menu and the intro and ending sequence, but I must honestly admit that my
motivation had suffered a lot and I just wanted to get done with it.

So I could probably have done something better than this, but not after so many
months of work on one and the same project. Initially I wanted to add a hidden
mini-game in the title menu - I intended to create a vector graphics conversion
of the best Vectrex game ever: Minestorm. I had already started to create the
graphics routines for that, but in the end the time ran out (I had scheduled the
Odiesoft Party 1 as a Megablasters release party for April 1994 and the deadline
was advancing quickly) and so I had to abandon this idea.

Another factor that increased the pressure to finish this game was that when I
looked at a list of games to buy from one French distributor I saw that the name
"Dynablasters" was listed. I was shocked to see that some company intended to
publish a similar game as well and I desparately needed to be the first to
publish this type of game. I never found out what had happened to this
"Dynablasters". It was obviously meant to be created by a French company, but
that's about everything I ever found out. In the end I came first with my
Megablasters and as far as I know nobody else ever released another Bomberman
clone on the CPC.

Instead of the missing hidden game I wanted to have a cool intro sequence to
introduce the game. I had thought about an adequate intro sequence for some time
before I finished the game itself and I already knew what I wanted to have: an
Odiesoft Logo where the big S is being painted by two small dots and when the
dots meet in the center the remaining blue color would appear with a flash to
present the whole Odiesoft Logo. During all this animation the first few tacts
of "Also sprach Zarathustra" were supposed to be playing. So I asked Crittersoap
to create that tune for me while I programmed the animation. Creating this intro
sequence wasn't really much work. Nowadays I still like the idea though I'm not
really too happy with the sound. I think Critty should have done a better job
with the music...

I also spent some time on creating a special display of such an inconspicuous
thing as the directory. Using some control codes I've setup a directory that,
when you try to list it, clears the screen and displays some text and
characters. Many demos and magazines changed the directory to display messages
instead of the file listing. But I wasn't satisfied with just displaying a
message like everyone else so I made some "@" characters appear behind the
Megablasters text so that it gave the text a three dimensional look by adding a
shadow in the back of the text. Besides that my manipulations of the directory
structure worked for any screen Mode whatsoever. (Often when you listed the
directory in Mode 0 or Mode 2 the whole effect went down the drain, because the
programmers didn't do the manipulation properly...)

With that the work on my game was - after two years of hard work - finally
finished!

And the best thing was, that I was right on time for the Odiesoft Party in April
of 1994.


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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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