Game Launch!

Hello everyone. 

Today I am happy to announce the release of my new Game(s) Beat Cancer and Empire Protector. 

I've uploaded the V1.03 game as a .LHA and as a 3MB .HDF.  The LHA comes in at 1.5MB, so I guess this game would fit onto a single 1.76MB HD floppy disk image, if someone compressed the heck out of it, or if the game is unpacked to Ram to run it. But the game saves high score data to the install location, so if you run it from Ram, the high scores will be lost.

For HDD users, this package uses CanDo: as an assign.  If you have CanDo assigned already, or if you just ran my Holiday game, then you'll have to unassign CanDo: and re-assign it to the game directory.  This happened because I did not assign a BeatCancer directory before making the game, so internally, all the paths in the game point to CanDo:BeatCancer/ . (because this is where I built the game from, hopefully I will have this fixed from the start next time).

Beat Cancer v1.02 Changelog

Since V0.73, I added all of the options to the options panel at the start of the game. I think the original panel on V0.73 looked so much cleaner! The buttons could have been made into toggle switches to save so space, but I'd already made the joystick menu routine by then.

The game is now possible to play with just a Joystick/controller exclusively. This means it is now compatible with AmigaMini, AntStream, and any Amiga setup without a mouse plugged in. The menus are massively clunky, because the screen has to re-draw all the info text with each screen refresh. I couldn't figure out how to get the text box to load up with a different set of text, or some kind of text feed, to that's why the info text scroll is very long!  The joy menus are activated by moving the controller or pressing the main fire button. Supports 2nd fire button to quit the games.

Music and SFX are now in the game, and several fancy transitions have now been included during the loading period between games. 

The Strategy Demo has been worked on a bit more. The main army can now get food and recruits from The British Isles before setting off. There is a new combat screen during battles, which shows the army's being depleted on both sides.  The defending army now has a random number of troops from 500-1500, and the enemy base will also have to be attacked in the same way.  This is fairly rudimentary, and is based on the Kingdoms of England/Germany games. Damage to your army is always light, and there are no penalties for running out of food or even troops. The last enemy army (of each tribe) to be killed in the field will stick around on the screen, showing they are dead. 

The  main game is almost the same, except I added some timeouts for all difficulty modes, so games don't go on all night.  These time-outs make it so that the enemy becomes weaker after a certain number of clicks/movements, and the game stops respawning enemies.  

Most of the work on the game itself went into the music and sound effects. The BOOM! when capturing a base in the Hitler scenario is still probably too loud, but I don't want to reduce it down again. The movement on the map game is supposed to represent a horse clip-clopping around. In the Nazi game, I couldn't find the exact sound of a tank I was looking for, so instead I used a deeper version of the horse riding sound. 

Memory requirements are now 2MB chip ram. This is simply because the high-res images and the music need about a megabyte to run, and on 1MB machines this can be an issue, unless you use SFX only.  If there is not enough memory, the game will appear to freeze or quit. I tried to add Buffer Flushes as much as possible to keep this issue to a minimum. If you have low memory and are concerned, there is a special hidden click box in the top-right corner of the menu screen, which displays the current system memory, and a few other things.

 If fans send in comments about bugs and other strange things, I will certainly fix them. But don't expect any major updates like the Holiday game, this one is  done.

V1.03 Changelog:

Removed the fancy transitions between screens when a game is Won, because it crashed the game (but it worked fine in CanDo!)  You can still see the original transitions by pressing the Main Menu buttons.

EDIT:

V1.03 a - Released 19th October 2023. I moved the character squares to overlap the home bases on the Body games, so that Tracers work without placing the tiles in the wrong initial places. The version is still V1.03.

Raw Artworks:

Title Page: Abrégé de la Chronique d’Enguerrand de Monstrelet, 15th Century, Paris.