ZZAPreview!

Dear Supporters

Your bumper new ЯRetro Show including a nostalgic Quick Bytes segment is coming most probably in the next day or two, but in the meantime, as a ZZAP! 64 contributor a benefit I'd like to offer you is early access to previews; a preview of a preview! The rest of the world won't see these for another month or two. Enjoy!

What's the Pig idea?

Christian Simpson aka Perifractic gets his trotters on groundbreaking new C64 game A Pig Quest

What do you get if you cross a DC Comics artist with a talented and ambitious C64 coder? A groundbreaking game with claims of features that at first make one exclaim "YEAH AND PIGS MIGHT FLY". But these little piggies look like they really will go to market. (Enough pig jokes Peri, it's still your first paragraph – Ed.) (Hog-wash! – Peri)

Don't let the dis-grunt-led editor put you off, he should pig on someone his own size. I'll write my future puns in invisible oink. (You're fired. – Ed.) (Great, where's my severance porkage?)

Well anyway, created by Alain Mauricet (design & graphics) and Antonio Savona (code), with music by Aldo & Gaetano Chiummo, A Pig Quest looks to be shaping into a little piece of Commodore magic that would impress even Hog-warts. Just look at these trotters, er, feet-ures:

• 200 rooms across 5 worlds
• Non-linear gameplay
• Weapons and armour
• Secret areas
• Dynamic weather atmospherics
• Cinematic cutscenes
• Non-tiled & animated bitmap graphics
• Animated bitmap backgrounds
• Sprites plus bitmap enemies
• 32 sprites on screen
• Over 1000 sprite frames

I chatted with Antonio about the inspiration for the game:

Antonio Savona: Alain Mauricet was at the time working on a graphic novel involving pigs. And when he got in touch with the subject for the game and a few test screens I immediately understood he was up to something really special. I had never seen anything like that on a C64 and I thought it would have been foolish of me to pass on the opportunity to be the one who would implement his vision. Unfortunately, that also meant I was putting myself into the most complex game-coding experience of my life. By far.

Christian Simpson: Wow! So how did you go about collaborating remotely during these challenging times?

AS: I'd encourage Alain to unleash his creativity and craft his pixels without any limitations, and for every majestic, memory-eating screen he would throw at me I'd just reply "keep them coming". And come they did, each presenting unique coding challenges, but also taking us one step closer to the goal of bringing the fantastic world of Frank further to life.

CS: Frankfurter?

AS: No, Frank. Then I said, further to life.

CS: One of the interesting things is that you're doing the game in non-tiled bitmap mode. Can you tell our readers more?

AS: Yes – in this way, each room is like a canvas, and Alain can pixel paint whatever he wants without constraints. But it's hard to make this snappy and animate the backgrounds too. That's where I come in.

CS: We've seen large animated bitmap objects on the C64 before but only in demos, I believe?

AS: That's right, and in demos everything is scripted. A Pig Quest is non-linear, so the player can go anywhere, any time. Now, some games with bitmap animations do exist, such as Cybernoid, but those bitmaps are small, and tiled. Ours are bigger.

CS: But Ladyfractic told me size doesn't matter. Ahem, moving on, another cool thing is the atmospherics in the game. How did you achieve such realistic driving rain for example?

AS: It's done with sprites, and stretches the multiplexer quite a bit. The drops fall at different angles and the trajectory on screen follows your direction of movement, ending with splashes on the ground. The aim was to make the most natural rain ever seen in a game.

CS: I'd say you rain supreme at that! Hello? Er, I also noticed the ground even becomes more slippery when it randomly rains. Kudos. I also love how you've achieved seamless room transitions.

AS: Yes, we wanted to avoid the player sitting looking at a blank screen, so if you head towards the left, for example, we start calculating the next screen in the background with unused CPU resources, just in case you do indeed leave to the left. If you head right instead, we recalculate predictively the next screen to the right, and buffer that, ready to swap it in if you exit the screen.

CS: Very exit-ing! So when will readers be able to go on a Pig Quest themselves?

AS: We're about 70% done right now, but the code is already larger than any of the 10 games I've done before. So we're going to take our time, not rush it, and get it perfect.

Well then I better stop ham-pering his progress. Stay tuned to ZZAP! 64 for our review of A Pig Quest in a future issue. I have a feeling they're gonna knock it out of the pork.

Your friend in retro, Perifractic