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What
we have here with our next GTW entry is Miles
Barry's first C64 game which was started while Jason
Kelk and Nigel Smith were
crashing over his place for a week.
The majority of superb graphics were done by Jason (TMR) Kelk, with a main sprite and paper based level designs by Nigel. Infact, its been recently found that the walker sprite is actually by Robin Levy and was borrowed from the early Armalyte previews that did the rounds! Jason is fairly sure thinking back that Nigel had originally shown them the same sprite editor.
Originally
the game started out as an advert in Zzap64 by Nigel, as he wanted
to have this particular game written. Miles contacted Nigel and
joined forces with to create this game. Both Miles and Jason took
over the project, and controlled the majority of it once Nigel
arrived at Miles house for the week. Unfortunately the game was
not to last really past the week that was spent on it. It is possible
that Nigel went on and finished off the game elsewhere according
to Jason.
The
game therefore consists of a well animated Ed209 based sprite
which walks left and right on a horizontally scrolling screen
with some smart initial looking graphics. It is not playable as
such, with no sprites to look at apart from the main character
and nothing really to do. It is at a very early stage.
The
loading screen itself came after Jason arrived back home, and
was inspired by Ed209 from Robocop.
The
game, if finished, was to be published by Diamond Bytes, which
was rumoured to be a software house offspring of Commodore Disk
User, which didn't get very far. Apex Images was infact Cosine
and Nigel, but the name soon died out as they discovered that
there was an Apex already out there.
There
is no more of this game to be found, apart from possibly any other
bits of work from Nigel himself, or even the paper designs he
did. Maybe if Nigel can be found, he can shed some light on this
title and maybe even tell us what happened next.
An
interesting title which will be examined more in the future....
Nice
early development of a promising title...
Frank
(Additional
source credits - Jason Kelk)
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