AcornGamez

The newly re-formed games development group, GEK, have launched their new website. There's information on their commercial and freeware games, some which were no longer available on the Internet.  

The previously commercial game, Joop: In The World Of Weirdness is available to download for free from their website along with a level editor. Joop is RISC OS 3 and 4 compatible.  

SPEEC is also freely downloadable for RISC OS 3.6+ and RISC OS 4. The plot of the game is:

"The sky IS falling! Chicken Little was right! You're the laser battery Commander and HERE THEY COME! ...an attack of meteors and to really make life interesting, some guided missiles and an Attack UFO! As your score goes higher, so does the excitement!"  

A 2-Dimensional scrolling war game is also for download from GEK's website, Balloon Invaders.  

Currently, all of GEK's commercial games are also available to buy on the GEK collection and on various games compliations from APDL.  

Reviews of GEK's freeware and commercial games will be published on AcornGamez soon.  

Richard Jones has updated his SudokuAid and SudokuAid16 programs. As the name suggests, the purpose of these applications is to help complete a tricky Sudoku puzzle. Those who are currently not familiar with digitalised Sudoku, try SuperDoku. Other Sudoku games are available but this is considered the best.    

SudokuAid and SudokuAid16 are available on the July 2007 (Volume 20, Issue 10) issue of Archive magazine's coverdisc or can be downloaded for free from here.   

What is Sudoku?

Sudoku (数独,) is a logic-based number placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9x9 grid so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3x3 boxes contains the digits from 1 to 9. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid.   

Completed Sudoku puzzles are a type of Latin square, with an additional constraint on the contents of individual regions. Leonhard Euler is sometimes incorrectly cited as the source of the puzzle, based on his work with Latin squares.    

The modern puzzle was invented by an American, Howard Garns, in 1979 and published by Dell Magazines under the name "Number Place". It became popular in Japan in 1986, after it was published by Nikoli and given the name Sudoku, meaning single number. It became an international hit in 2005 and continues to be extremely popular to this day.  

If you have a javascript enabled browser, you can play Sudoku online here, users with non-javascript browsers can play Sudoku online here.   

Jeroen Groenendaal and his brother have recently set up a brand new games development group for RISC OS, picking up from where GEK and VOTI/FLAYMZ left off. Jeroen and his brother ran the GEK games development group until the year 2000 when they ceased trading.   

A name for this development group is currently undecided but it looks like some cracking games are on their way for RISC OS, including the arcade fighter Sumisu San and many more, including ports of some Flash games too.  

A website will be set up soon to host their freeware games. A lot of projects like Sumisu San were almost complete, so expect some releases quite soon.  

This new group is the third company dedicated to RISC OS games development, this shows that there's still life in the old Acorn yet! 

Watch this space for more information on this exciting development in RISC OS's history.

The AcornGamez video archive continues to expand, and this time it's even more exciting! 

 Check out the demo version of Spheres of Chaos (the full version is amazing, and was still under development very recently): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jISaTHFvTso 

Boffin is a platformer, but is it educational? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N32gfn_CgIc   Axis is a shootemup, but wasn't Wavelength better? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdNhDQwS0QM  

RISC OS "beatemups" were thin on the ground, was this because of the educational slant? Our playtester said of this game, "I've had better tolchockings". You can tell, too, he gets fed up of it; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7Yhs87gcNo 

Iron Lord was endlessly popular (it's the galloping effect), and this clip includes one of the Easter Eggs.  Who can tell us about the other two? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLe5mxCdGZc 

And of course, before Tom Cooper (Berty) was famous, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcDzwfT2wh4 showed much of his genius.  

Even more AcornGamez videos coming within the next 24 hours!

Rik Griffin of Popcorn fame is working on a simple new game using his game writing library Popcorn. Popcorn is a C library for games developers. Popcorn provides many useful facilties for writing games under RISC OS, such as fast sprite plotting, object handling and collision detection, resource management etc.

Hopefully, Rik will release his new game rather soon. We haven't seen quite as many new freeware releases as we used to, but that may be a sign that the developers are working on something big!

Christopher Bazley, mostly known for his work on the excellent Starfighter 3000, has updated SFSkyEdit, an editor for Starfighter 3000 sky colours files. 

A sky colours file (in "!Star3000.Landscapes.Sky") specifies the colours used to paint a particular type of planetary atmosphere (e.g. sunset, morning, night, gas clouds etc). This application allows you to edit these colours or define new skies. 

SFSkyEdit has a sophisticated selection model for colour bands. Copy/move operations may either be done using the clipboard or through a drag & drop interface. Changes to sky files can be observed in real time using the preview window, which renders the sky as it would appear in the game. Multiple files may be edited simultaneously, and accessed from the iconbar menu. 

Christopher also mentions on his website that Starfighter 3000 hasn't been updated in almost a year and says "Will it be the last?", does this mean that it no longer needs development? Does it mean a new version isn't under development at the moment?

Blasts of the Xtreme are aiming to release a text adventure called OldFish at the South East show this October. The author is also considering making a sequel if the game is successful. The game will probably be available for users to buy for their RISC OS computers for £5.00 in the BOTX Budget Range.

OldFish is an adventure about the history of lung fish and the adventures of one, watch this space for more information on this upcoming title from Blasts of the Xtreme.

The game will feature mind-boggling mysteries and mazes, foot-tapping music, and of course graphics.

OldFish is only one of the many titles to be released at the Guildford show in October, Blasts of the Xtreme are also hoping to release their soccer management game, Xtreme Soccer 2008 at the show, as well as other new games. 

Autumn 2007 is certainly going to be a good time for RISC OS games, with a new game from Fantasia FAN and at least three new games from Blasts of the Xtreme!

Rik Griffin of Squeaky Software has updated his RISC OS game writing library Popcorn, a C library for games developers. 

Popcorn provides many useful facilities for writing games under RISC OS, such as fast sprite plotting, object handling and collision detection, resource management etc. 

New in this version of Popcorn are: 

  Support for 32 bpp screen modes, and 32 bpp sprites. 
  Support for alpha blending of 32 bpp sprites. 
  Hardware acceleration on 80321 based machines (Iyonix). 
  New facilities, bugs fixed, tidier API. 

Popcorn is free to download and use from here. Full source code is provided. A tutorial showing how to write a simple game using Popcorn is available from the same web page. 

Those of you who emulate RISC OS using a freeware emulator would be glad to know that Wocki has released Iron Lord to download for free from his website as a disc image, as usual, the Arc-GB project is updated.

Those of you with Virtual RiscPC or who own a real machine, you can download Iron Lord for free from here.

Iron Lord was written by Cygnus Software Engineering and was ported to RISC OS by James Byrne.Iron Lord is now quite an old game but still fun to play none the less.

Derek Haslam is going to Wakefield to tell about the development of his adventure game he originally developed for 8-bit machines and has now redeveloped for RISC OS, Mirror of Khoronz. Mirror of Khoronz can be freely downloaded from here.

History of Mirror of Khoronz (taken from Derek's website):

"Way back in 1983, when computer graphics were still fairly primitive, text adventure games enjoyed considerable popularity. The genre was created by two Americans, Crowther and Woods, with a game called simply "Adventure". Written in Fortran and running on a PDP11 mainframe, "Adventure" was set in an undergound complex which the authors called Colossal Cave. The game quickly became the most frequently-accessed program on the system - no-one had encountered anything like it before and it proved very addictive.

My first text adventure game for the BBC micro was published by Acornsoft under the name Gateway to Karos and was favourably reviewed in Acorn User. Encouraged by this I followed it up with a sequel: The Mirror of Khoronz. By the time Mirror was completed, however, graphical games were all the rage, text-only adventures were old hat, and Acornsoft were no longer interested. Mirror was made available from several PD libraries but no commercial version has ever appeared.

RISC OS machines liberated us once and for all from the severe memory constraints of the BBC micro and made possible a more polished version of Mirror. The project was begun, postponed, begun again and now, finally, here it is. Download The Mirror of Khoronz from here and have fun! It's a 200Kb zip file and comes with instructions in HTML format. My intention is to produce a polished RISC OS version of Gateway to Karos in the near future (years ago Acorn generously gave us permission to re-release it into the public domain) and there is even the possibility of a third part (The Far Islands, yet to be written) to complete the trilogy."

Derek also visited a different RISC OS usergroup a few months ago and of what I have heard from people who attended the meet, it was a very good speach and even though the majority in the club were not interested in games, all the members got involved and were rather enthusiastic about the game.

So if you're in reach of the Wakefield RISC OS usergroup and want to attend the meet, here's the information you need!

Wednesday, 6th June, 2007

West Yorkshire Sports and Social Club,
Sandal Hall Close, off Walton Lane
(A61) Barnsley Road,
Sandal
WAKEFIELD

Visit the club's website for more information.