A few fun facts

Before we make a detailed rundown on all the features and funny sides of this project, here’s a few tidbits for starters 🙂

Listed in no particular order.

  • The game features both a smooth vertical and horizontal scroll. In the multidirection-scroll levels, the engine uses an intelligent pathway and viewport system, IPVS, to navigate the player around (programmer’s note: The Marketing Department insisted on this line!!! 🙂 )
  • The game is written in C (using SDCC) and z80 assembly. python has been used for creating scripts for conversions, pre-calculations and general glue.
  • The game uses a large set of interesting, technical techniques. Such as screen split and sprite splits. As an example there are often more than 32 sprites on screen when 32 is the limit.
  • All sound effects are custom and written for this game in mind. There are 34 in total and up to three are played simultaneously.
  • The game runs in both 50Hz and 60Hz. The music runs at the same original speed in both frequencies and careful attention has been put into making the visuals run in sync with the music in scripted scenes. Scrolling and animations on screen do follow the frame-rate though, so the gameplay may feel a bit slower on PAL-machines.
  • Joystick and keyboard may be used interchangeably during a game.
  • The appearance of the game is based on 16×16 blocks, but internally the game engine is based around smaller 8×8 tiles. So that, the blocks are just a pure visual tribute to the great platformers of the 80’s.
  • The game does not use BIOS.
  • Many parts of the game are heavily optimized. Expect to find greater elaboration on the techniques used, at a later stage.
  • The detached camera-feature came in rather late in development, but really added a great boost to the immersion. Even if this way of showing the game scene was not commonplace back in the day, we chose to include it anyways.
  • There has been extra effort put into the slot selection and save-games as well. We wanted it to work like in the classic consoles. In the premium version there are up to six games which are saved onto the cartridge. In the free version you will save to ram in one of the slots, and in this case, data will not survive a power-cycle.
  • We’ve also put an extra layer of polish to menus and buttons by adding a 3D / shadow effect on the text. And there is visual feedback when pressing the buttons and menu-items.
  • We also use our custom proportional font on most screens except the ingame/scrolling screen.
  • The music in the game accounts for more than 70% of the ROM size –it is 20 different tunes featuring 23 minutes of pure 9-channel FM pleasure.
  • Running this game without MSX Music is in practise possible, but should be considered a sin.
  • This game was written during Covid-19 pandemic.
  • This game will also be released in a physical cartridge as a Premium version which includes the ability to save games onto the cartridge itself.
  • The game’s inception came partly as a reaction towards blocky scrolls and movement often found in MSX titles, so smoothness as a vision for the game resulted in smooth fullscreen scroll, smooth movement on vertical and horizontal platforms, parallax scroll on clouds as well as fade-ins and fade-outs in both visuals and audio.
  • Even if this is an action platformer, there is a proper backstory which is presented after the title screen and runs for a whopping 4:24 minutes.
  • For the programmer, this is the result of around 3000 hours of work fun during the last 2.5 years while listening massively to Jogeir Liljedahl on Spotify, eating way too much Ferrero Rocher and drinking excessive amounts of coffee.
  • Except for the use of an external decompression algorithm (pletter), everything in this game is written from scratch. Graphics-engine, 9-channel music-player, 3-channel sfx-player, memory-management and so on.
  • What makes this msx-platformer different is the full screen horizontal scroll with clean cut edges normally only found on MSX2+ and higher
  • Just as in the arcades or the best classic Konami games, the game runs demos of the game if you wait out the title-screen.

Facts & Media
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