Acorn Island

[ChrisB]

Introducing Acorn Island a new arcade adventure game for the BBC Micro Model B, B+ and Master.

Somewhere of the coast of Cambridgeshire, hidden in the mist, lies Acorn Island…

You have arrived at the mysterious Acorn Island in search of the enigmatic Lady Phoebe. However, on arrival you find that the local residents are reporting problems with rogue sprites roaming the landscape. By meeting the various people living on the island and helping them you will gain upgrades and new abilities. Use these to explore the island, battle the sprites, find Lady Phoebe and restore peace and harmony.

Featuring:

• Colourful Mode 2 graphics with 4 way scrolling.
• A procedurally generated play area over 1000 times larger than the screen.
• A 40 stage branching quest line with over 3K of text.
• NULA support (Support ROM required for enhanced title screen.)
• AI generated title screen.

Controls:

• Z X * / Return – Move and fire (redefinable).
• f0 – Pause and display the last quest text.
• f1 – Change sound volume.
• f2 – Toggle background tune.

AcornIsland.ssd

(44.25 KiB) Downloaded 81 times

AcornIsland.uef

(26.72 KiB) Downloaded 28 times

V2 added for VLSI comparability - see below for release notes.

acorn isalnd title.png (26.43 KiB) Viewed 3568 times

acorn isalnd village.png (11.08 KiB) Viewed 3568 times

acorn isalnd initialscreen.png (9.08 KiB) Viewed 3568 times

acorn isalnd baddies.png (10.88 KiB) Viewed 3568 times

Development thread.

[nicolagiacobbe]

Nice, really nice. I have a small question: did you use a virtual machine to handle the dialogs?
As the mode 2 screen is leaving little memory I thought some VM was used.

[lurkio]

Amazing!



This is now online at bbcmicro.co.uk, together with Chris's other games:

http://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=4286

Chris, please let me know if the metadata (genre, secondary genre, etc.) needs updating.

[ChrisB]

Nice, really nice. I have a small question: did you use a virtual machine to handle the dialogs?
As the mode 2 screen is leaving little memory I thought some VM was used.

I'm not sure I quite understand what you mean. With the OS kicked out and the screen reduced in size slightly that leaves just under 15K free for code and data. The quest actions are stored as 3 bytes each which give such things as the type of quest, the number of lines of text and and dependencies for the quest. The actual text is compressed (down to about 1.6K) and I simply read through it until I have enough lines.

[garfield]

It looks very slick Chris.

I seem to wander aimlessly. Some black enemies appear, but 'Fire' does not seem to do anything. Am i missing something fundamental ? I never find the lady in the first quest.

[ChrisB]

I seem to wander aimlessly. Some black enemies appear, but 'Fire' does not seem to do anything. Am i missing something fundamental ? I never find the lady in the first quest.

Fire won't work initially - you'll need to find someone to help you with that.
Your overall objective is to find Phoebe. But - in the first instance "you should find a local called Jim, described as "a bit slow but knows a lot". Hopefully he can help you. There appears to be a small settlement to the east. You should try the houses there." (From the intro story).

[garfield]

Oh well. Tried again ( for 20 minutes! ) , with various explorations eastward (to the right) but found nothing. Seems very expansive, though. Great colours, especially the NuLA stuff.

[ChrisB]

You need to walk into the rightmost red house in the village to the right of your starting location (second picture above) and go from there.

[tnash]

Is there a way to show quest instructions again? I went north , avoiding the insistent chaps that live in the black hole thingy then someone told me to take something-or-other to someone-somewhere and I'm afraid it completely slipped my mind to pay any attention to what she wanted me to do!

[ChrisB]

Yes. Pause the game with f0. The last quest text (excluding signposts) will be displayed. However - it's possible to have multiple quest lines so you'll just have to remember some of them...

[ChrisB]

Over in the development thread it has been noted that there is a problem on VLSI Masters which we hope to have fixed soon. It has also been pointed out that there are a couple of quests that incorrectly say west when they should say east.

Specifically
Gur oyhr gbjref fubhyq or va gur prageny naq rnfg sberfgf.
Gur gerr fnc vf sebz gur gerr gb gur rnfg pbnfg.

These will be corrected in the next release.

[ChrisB]

Version 2 updated to first post.

With many thanks to Rich Talbot-Watkins, vectoreyes, crissawer, Lurkio and others for diagnosing, fixing and testing this.

Changes in this version:

• Updated interrupt routines to play nicely with a VLSI 6845. This has included adding another interrupt half way down screen for my re-draw synchronisation to remove corruption on scrolling right.
• Code wrangling to make some more space.
• Added some new signs and added more information to other signs to provide more information early game.
• Swapped the names of the forests to save memory.
• Updated two mistakes in quests to indicate East instead of West.
• Clarified the next action on an early game quest.
• Edit: Also changed tape loader order to show more title screen whilst loading.

[Iggypop]

Lovely game.. keep going..

[sa_scott]

Such a great piece of work Chris. I'm gonna promote this on Twitter.