The Wrath of the Mazogs

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blittled
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Joined: Fri Dec 19, 2008 3:04 am
Location: Northwestern Pennsylvania, USA

The Wrath of the Mazogs

Post by blittled »

It has been many years since an intrepid treasure hunter has entered the Mazog Maze. The Mazogs have not been sitting idle during this time. They have been using prisoners to learn better fighting skills and have been intensely studying the mystic arts. Their time was well spent since now they not only attack from the left and right but also from the front and back! They also have conjured up mystical traps that transport an unfortunate traveler to the far corners of the maze. Time has also taken its toll on many of the unreachable swords which have rusted away. Are you daring and courageous enough to enter the maze in search of treasure while evading the wrath of the Mazogs?

This is the sequel to Mazogs. I have added the ability for the Mazogs to attack from all four directions. There are also "Warp Traps". These traps are invisible and will send you to a random location in the maze. You may end up next to a Mazog or the treasure. These traps disappear once they go off. Any trails you have will remain unless you set the trap off during the time "This Way" is shown. Also the number of swords and prisoners has been reduced. So there are now 38 Mazogs, 30 swords, 20 prisoners and 10 warp traps. The swords and prisoners are now all placed along the paths of the maze so you have access to all of them. The 3 levels "Try It Out", "Face a Challenge" and "Maniac Mobile Mazogs" are still there but with the traps and reduced counts of prisoners and swords.

I have tested the game on the Eighty One emulator. Also I wanted more features but the program originally had less than 1K of free ram so there was very little space to add any more features even with removing all unused code and REM remnants. To add more will require restructuring the program.

I hope you enjoy the program and post any bugs you find on this thread.
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2X Timex Sinclair 1000, ZX81, ZX80Core, 5X 16K Ram Pack, ZXBlast, ZX P file to Ear Input Signal Converter, Elf II
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siggi
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Re: The Wrath of the Mazogs

Post by siggi »

I played the game today and I had some strange effects, but none of them was reproducible ;)
- the game crashed at the end, while I was "examining the maze" and pressing the "down" key (maybe at the lower end of the maze?)
- the game crashed during a move
- after I had a fight with a monster and had won this fight, I moved one step left and the monster was there again and won :( (maybe that has been a different monster I had not seen before????)

Siggi
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blittled
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Location: Northwestern Pennsylvania, USA

Re: The Wrath of the Mazogs

Post by blittled »

Siggi, thanks for pointing these bugs out.

I have played Mazogs many times over the years and I have found when examining the maze after the game if you move the map around and cause the edges of the maze to wrap arouund to the opposite side the program can sometimes crash. For example if you scroll the maze up by moving down so that the top of the maze starts showing up at the bottom weird things may start to happen with the screen and usually crashes the the program. For that reason I rarely use that feature or when I use it I carefully avoid causing the maze to wrap around. I'll look at the scroll routine and see what causes it.

Were you playing one of the modes where Mazogs do not move around when the Mazog reappeared? Paul commented in the code that when the Mazogs are first generated their placement is not checked against the other 37 Mazogs. This could easily cause 2 Mazogs to be placed in the same place. If the Mazogs move around they'll immediately take other places but if they do not and 2 Mazogs occupy the same place it will look like the Mazog reappears when you kill it when actually you are fighting a second Mazog. I originally increased the number of Mazogs to 60 and the double Mazog became much more common so I bumped it back to 38. I tried a checking routine to avoid this condition but ran out of RAM.

I have taken out routines that aren't used and removed the remnants of REMs to optimize space. In Paul's comments in the code, he mentioned that only part of the maze scroll routine is used so when I work on the fix for the first bug I'll try to optimize it for space so I can insert the Mazog checking routine.
2X Timex Sinclair 1000, ZX81, ZX80Core, 5X 16K Ram Pack, ZXBlast, ZX P file to Ear Input Signal Converter, Elf II
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