HOMEBREW HEROES
Karl Hörnell’s back catalogue on the C64 includes Toadforce, Clean Up Service and Fungus; after a few decades away from the breadbin he’s returned with Iceblox Plus and we wanted a chat to find out more
Iceblox Plus is on a range of devices, but where did the idea for a Commodore 64 conversion come from?
I happened to find some Youtube videos about 6502 programming, which brought back memories from the good old days. So I decided to look into what kind of development tools were available for the Mac, just out of curiosity at first. This eventually spiralled into the desire to create something challenging.
Iceblox Plus became the natural choice because the gameplay was simple, I had already ported it to a lot of other platforms, and – at least if you consider the 3D perspective – it looked different from nearly every other existing C64 game. That meant it would pretty much have its own niche and not be unfavourably compared to the insanely elaborate platform adventures and horizontally scrolling shoot-’em-ups that people build nowadays.
And how long did it take to convert from Java to 6502 assembly language?
I’m not sure specifically how much time went into the programming. Everything had to be completely redesigned. The whole project, from start to initial release, took just under a month. Since it was only a hobby, I couldn’t work full time on it, of course. How do the tools available now compare to what you had while writing games in the Eighties?
The coding and debugging tools are infinitely better.
Back then I used a primitive assembler that handled just one line at a time, as you typed it in. Editing code wasn’t possible, you could only overwrite. Something I miss is my old sprite editor, although it wouldn’t have been very useful in this case. The penguin and the ice blocks consist of partly overlapping sprites, and building a new editor flexible enough to handle this would have been too much work for just one game. I had to settle for a Commodore 64-style pixel editor I found online and then convert the result into the proper byte format.
My overall impression is that keeping the code and graphical resources on a real computer, and transferring the resulting program to the C64 – or more accurately an emulator – after compiling, makes the development process a lot less claustrophobic than it used to be.
What kind of feedback have you had so far from C64 gamers in regards to Iceblox Plus?
The little direct feedback
I’ve had has been entirely positive. I’m sure there is a play through video somewhere with at least one commenter who thinks the game is garbage, but I haven’t bothered looking.
Finally, have you got any future plans our readers might be interested in? Afraid not. Nothing specific, at least.
the main play area is a little small but the graphics are reproduced faithfully