And my latest project was this:Obviously it's a Zeddy version of the arcade classic Hunchback, published as a Sinclair User type-in and helpfully preserved for posterity by the good good people at The Type Fantastic.
It's absolutely terrible. In an attempt to buff it up by cutting out unnecessary code that achieved nothing except massively slow down the already-slow game experience, I reduced it to this without losing any worthwhile features:
or approximately half the size.
It's still bloody awful (although turning the main gameplay loop into a little machine-code subroutine with MCoder or the like might pay some worthwhile dividends), but now at least it doesn't take so long about it. Here's my stripped-down version, btw:
But the thing is, the ZX81 could have a great Hunchback. It's a game almost custom-designed for the format - small play area, only a few moving objects, no scrolling needed, essentially block-based gameplay. The SU version at least looked quite stylish:
And a proper one could be even prettier, since two thirds of the screen is static scenery. So how come nobody ever tried it? Or is there one that I just don't know about?
