"Robico's long-awaited Western spoof, 'Blazing Star', should be out for Christmas in BBC and Electron versions. Ian Muriss (author of The Hunt) has taken over the programming now."
I then asked if it was possible that, after he abandoned the game, Robico might have appointed someone else to finish it.Ian wrote:
I remember writing the western but I seem to remember that I lost interest in it before finishing. I was at university when I wrote The Hunt in 1987 and the next year I graduated and entered the "real" world, which is when I would have been writing it. I can't remember for sure but I probably decided that the few quid I made from the games was great when I was a student but not worth the effort when I was earning a reasonable wage and working full-time. Unfortunately I don't think I have anything left of the game. I was pretty bad at keeping the source assembly language, to the effect that I often had to make changes by patching the machine code. I am still a programmer now (I write a workout app for the Apple Watch) and just the thought of my hacky coding back then causes me deep shame!That link about Wizard's Challenge was also really interesting. To think that people were still playing the game 35 years after I wrote it is amazing! Sorry that I can't be of more help, but many thanks for the nostalgia - you have made my day!
I went on to ask him if he could remember if Blazing Star was entirely his own project or whether it was passed on to him by Robico to complete (I got that impression from the short magazine article) in which case it would be nice to know who started it.Ian wrote:
I very much doubt that Robico continued with the game but I can't remember for sure. I don't remember handing it over, which would have been quite a task given my bad coding practices back then.
He then went on to discuss his second game, The Hunt: Search for Shauna:Ian wrote:
I can't remember much about Blazing Star, to the extent that I couldn't remember the name until you mentioned it! Sorry about that. It was a follow up to The Hunt, but I can't remember how much of the plot was mine and how much was Robico. The coding was probably just me though.
I then mentioned Mark Moxon's brilliant deconstruction and documentation of Elite and gave him a number of links to Mark's topics on stardot:Ian wrote:
The Hunt was all mine, and completely custom built. I don't think I was even aware of the concept of using third-party code back then. It was inspired by Elite. I saw how they had managed to change the screen mode part way down the screen and was amazed. The top was "high" resolution but black and white, and the bottom was low resolution with more colours. I figured the reverse would be ideal for a graphical adventure. The main problem was compression. I wanted about 100 locations (although I can't remember if that was what there were in the end) and with the screen memory using a lot of the RAM that left about 20kb for the game, so only about 200 bytes per room for both the text and the graphics as well as the code. I was using every bit of every byte! I remember the graphics were built up of parallelograms with 4 bits to say which sides were drawn, a few bits for the angle, and a few bytes to specify the fill or pattern. I used a very basic text compression system for the Hunt, which was similar to that used in Wizard's Challenge. It used 8 bit values which covered the usual letters and numbers but also had numbers which represented common strings such as 'the ', 'and ' etc. I then wrote the text with the knowledge of what would compress best. I can't remember much about the code for the game itself because most of my focus was squeezing the most out of the limited memory. The use of graphics meant that getting round the memory limitations was the hardest part. In some ways writing apps for the Apple Watch is similar, because it is so restricted compared to the iPhone, so I spend a lot of time working round those restrictions. When The Hunt was finished I offered it around some companies and Robico liked it and we agreed that they would publish it. They also gave me an Acorn Electron and I wrote a version for that. And later on we moved on to Blazing Star but unfortunately, as I say, I can't remember much about that. I had a habit back then of getting bored of a project and moving on before it was finished, and I think that is what happened then. There was so much else going on in my life as I left university and started working for a software company.
Remembering that The Wizard's Challenge was a Micro Power text adventure, I asked him (a long shot certainly) if Labyrinths of LaCoshe was one of his.Ian wrote:
Wow - that Elite deep dive is fantastic! I expect that I will be spending a few happy hours looking at that.
It was really nice to get in touch with Ian and hear his thoughts on his time programming for the BBC. He's currently playing one of his old games on the Complete BBC Micro Games Archive (he got himself killed (by himself!) after a few moves. I pointed him in the direction of CASA...Ian wrote:
Sorry - I'm afraid that I never knew any other authors for Micro Power. I just sent the game off to them and they published it.
