A new retro RPG, written in Assembly for TI-99/4a!!!
 

Surfing the Net I found the website of a guy who's creating a retro-looking RPG, in Ultima stile. He's writing the game in pure assembly for the TI-99/4a!!!

Here it is his website: http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg/

He also had posted a list of games he used for inspiration... well, there are some well-known classics like Ultima or Final Fantasy (the first, for NES), but there're many games I never heard before like Gates of Delirium, Dungeons of Daggorath (both for TRS-80!) and Legends 1&2 (by SSI) for TI-99/4a!!

Here's some screenshot of Realms of Antiquity, his "old looking" game...

http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg/images/faux.png

http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg/images/demo040.png http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg/images/demo025.png
http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg/images/demo030.png http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg/images/demo020.png

Dungeons of Daggorath i've tryed some years ago, and beside the difficult controls, was amazing

I'm very interest in Gates of Delirium (here's a nice blog by a guy who is playing it). Really I don't like Ultima itself, but I love many of its clones :spin

I'm going to save the pages of the blog and I'll use them later as a walktrough ^^

http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/sy...ro.preview.png

the link is broken methinks...

Corrected. In the blog you must search for the "Gates of Delirium Live" posts.

it looks a great game... i've spent all my patience for these games with Crawl! last year, but i love the colour key of this one.

Do you mean Dungeon Crawl?

yep... a great game except for the experience cap that could have been higher (or the difficulty lower...)

I liked Ultima clones as much as I hate Roguelike games... it's like a real D&D playing: a dungeon-only adventure is quite boring... better explore outdoors! ;)

@MazinKaesar

I totally agree. Many (too many!) rpg games are dungeon-only..
Btw, I liked Ultima6 very much, and I'm currently playing Ambermoon.. really amazing rpg game, I think! :-)

well i agree too, on the fact that RPG in theory are way better than dungeon crawls.

but it is also a fact that the majority of RPGs i've played steered me toward the character building and far away from the role and fun. there are very few rpg games that have given me more than that on computer: only the little experience i have in pen and paper rpg was satisfactory in that respect, and i don't even think to anything more recent than the basic DnD!

henceforth i came to like, even if i do not play them a lot, the straightforwardness of the crawl games, they at least do not fail at being rpg, as they don't even try :)

btw, i'm half a mind to abuse of Telengard right now...

That is a very sharp looking TI99/4a game. Only dungeon crawl I can think of for that system is Tunnels of Doom (which I have yet to really give a go).

Yikes ;)

~telengard

Crpg
 

Hello all,

Thank you for your kind words for my efforts. I'm at a new job, so I haven't been working on it as much as I should, but I'll be getting it done!

Adamantyr

Good luck for your new job! We are waiting for your game!!! ;)

Damn. What a lovely website. I wish more people would make sites like this.
Oh, and I loved the Avernum series...

i've read more throughouly the non technical parts of your site, great work indeed, specially that cool review of your inspirations.
i look forward to try your game, it is really promising!

@Adamantyr
But please, not so much random encounters!!! ;) They were the real plague of the '80 CRPG!!! ...

Allaying fears
 

Yeah, I never liked that aspect of the old games either... 200 hours of game time where most of it is just fighting random encounters to reach some arbitrary level is NOT fun.

My plan right now is to have some fixed encounters in places, but the files will be updated so you can't "revisit" to fight them over and over again, and actual random encounters will be spawned rarely. There is a "spawn" clock, under which a counter is added to at an interval, and a random check against it is made. If the number is under the counter, a random spawn is done. Otherwise it continues to count up. This lets me have some areas that spawn monsters faster than others.

Also, experience will dynamically scale so that hunting weak monsters will get you less or none, to prevent long-scale camping in any one area. My feeling is that if you want your characters to grow, you have to travel and see new things.

Adamantyr

Sounds very nice!!!!

Nice idea too!!!! Even when I mastered in old pen&paper D&D I did not give xp for week monster to high level characters! :)

I think it makes a lot of sense. A character who has slain hundreds of "goblins" should not get the same experience for camping and waiting for respawns of them, as a character who slays his/her first.

This was a fault with many RPGs, where you could camp for more powerful respawns that yielded loads of experience - this would in turn make you yourself very powerful when you had not even progressed the story of the game, or even moved to another area (never a problem in PnP, with a DM).

In some games, it was tempting to do this. If you just needed to "get that edge" you might be seduced into camping "just a few times", and you could rationalise that by thinking "well, I botched that quest back there", or something. But it can get out of hand and break the game...

As MazinKaesar alludes, DnD has a "challenge rating" for monsters, which is compared with the power-level of the party, yielding appropriate experience based on that (well, sometimes - it's pretty complicated).

I'm not really this oldskool, but I love the elegance of this style: minimal GFX, colour, anims - leaving stuff up to the imagination, BUT even moreso if it was "isometricised" (was that a contradiction?), tho' I doubt that would be possible on such a system...

Oh shut-up, oneshotdead!