The Making Of: Avalon & Dragontorc
Graeme Mason quizzes Steve Turner about his medieval-themed Spectrum game and its sequel
The Seiddab games had proved to be fruitful for developer Graftgold and publisher Hewson throughout 1983 and early 1984. Shoot-‘em-ups, together with platform games, were still the go-to genre for publishers, and we once more sit opposite Seiddab’s creator, Steve Turner, his living room no less cosy than when we chatted about Graftgold a few months ago. “I noticed in the magazines, especially Crash, that the phrase ‘not another shoot-‘em-up’ appeared a lot,” he begins. “They were selling, but quickly going out of favour with the press.” Steve correctly identifies that Crash and its peers, were key influencers upon the Spectrum’s audience; if the mags were getting tired of shooting games, it was a fair chance Speccy fans were too. “Those games were like hit singles. I wanted to do something that was the equivalent of an LP, something that would last longer than five minutes, and that people would want to go back and play again and again.”
Several influences converged at this point, all of them contributing towards the idea that would become Avalon. “I used to play a Dungeons & Dragons-type game called Runequest with Andrew [Braybrook] and some friends,” continues Steve. “That got me thinking that a similar thing would be great on a computer.” For the technical aspect, the coder noted Ultimate’s Atic Atac and its clean, topdown perspective walls. “That taught me that you didn’t need a full backdrop, just lines, to suggest depth. So I experimented with some drawings to make a display a bit like a theatre, a 3D look without it actually being full 3D.” The third influence informed Avalon’s storyline. A keen fan of history, Steve drew upon his current reading material, Geoffrey Ashe’s take on ancient British legends, specifically the author’s first book, King Arthur’s Avalon: The Story Of Glastonbury. “I thought it would be good to put the D&D thing into a myth
everybody knows, and was also aware that if you could put a recognisable name in, it could become a lot more popular.”
Dipping into the Arthurian legends reveals a list of notable events associated with the Isle Of Avalon. Steve explains, “The area has always been associated with myth, so I thought it would make a superb setting.” Considered to be the area where Arthur recovered after the battle of Camlann and also the birthplace of Excalibur, the developer created a story tied into the legends, with a sizeable dab of his own fertile imagination. “I tried to key in as much as I could to real places, creating the illusion of reality, even through fantasy. I invented this story of the wizards of the age having a battle with the lord of dark forces, all going on underground before the area is sealed off.” The player must revisit the scene of the battle as the evil lord once more threatens the land. “I got the idea from Tolkien, because he created what seemed a real world, and it had a history, and then hints of history.” Furthermore, in Geoffrey Ashe’s book, the top of a staff is discovered in the excavated hill. Steve used this as a basis for the staff which Avalon’s wizard, named Maroc, carries around. “Maroc was the character invented for my son, Mark, when he used to attend our D&D sessions, aged two or three at the time. He had his own character, a mage, so I thought I might as well use that.” Maroc, a gatherer of knowledge of the old ways, is accosted by an old woman sometime in the year 408AD. The Roman Empire is fleeing and barbarian hordes are on the cusp of invading. But it’s the Lord Of Chaos who presents the biggest danger to the land, and it appears Maroc is the only one who can stop him. One night, the mage makes his way to the Isle Of Avalon, and prepares to battle the forces of evil. Through the Caverns Of Doom, Goblin Warren and Catacombs Of The Dead, Maroc must venture, before the final confrontation with the Lord Of Chaos himself.
With an idea for Avalon’s display, Steve began to create sample screens and devise gameplay. “I thought about all the kind of things I could do with the game, like pick up objects, put objects on other objects, use magic, hide things and so on. And I had to invent a way of getting it all into 48k.” Achieving Avalon’s desired screen view, a pseudo-3d effect, was Steve’s first task. “I’d had a border around a couple of my previous games, a console around the space ship, and wanted to keep that because it gave a sense of depth, narrowed down the area you had to plot, and reduced what you had to move around the screen.” Steve took the panels from his Seiddab games and adapted them for the new scenario, before working out what was going to take place inside the border. “I started out on paper,” he divulges, opening a folder and revealing a glorious spread of 35-year-old drawings. “And drew a Spectrum-sized screen, cut it out from blank paper, and drew scenes on another piece of
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paper, moving them behind so I could see what it looked like. It was a good way of getting an idea of the scale, and I needed fixed angles so I could use the same graphics over and over again.” Now the theatre comparison came to the fore as Steve realised that they usually contained two sides, set at an angle, with a suitable backdrop panel. “I thought that would work, graphics side and back. I had the horizon from Lunattack made out of a line of sprites, so started out with that, which became the back of the room.” Next came a small segment of bricks to fortify the illusion of a wall, along with diagonals and corners. “And that scrolled around pretty well, so I added more substance, such as the higher corners of the room. You don’t need a lot to have the illusion, and I did this all first as I knew if it didn’t work I’d have to rethink the whole game again.”
Avalon’s central graphic, Maroc the wizard, was the first major problem that presented itself. “I needed him to be quite big, and realised that if I started animating a walking wizard, I was going to run out of graphics fast.” Steve’s logical solution, considering Maroc’s profession, was to have the character fly. “But I still needed to animate him in eight directions, so bought some plasticine and made a little wizard model. Then I sketched him from eight directions, and got that into the game in a standard sprite routine.” At this point, Avalon began to form for definite as Steve admired the solid, yet swift way in which the hero moved. “He’d rise up from the floor, and then settle down. So I needed a shadow in order to enforce this, which Hewson called a flying carpet!” Keen to emphasise his Lp-rather-than-single tenet, he created a relatively huge amount of objectives and task for the player to compete, and set them all within a gargantuan map of 255 screens. “After the game’s release, a magazine demanded a solution. I said, ‘Not yet! Give it time!’” laughs Steve. “They were expecting a list of about ten things the player had to do, but it was pages and pages long for Avalon.”
Work proceeded efficiently on Avalon; both Steve and Andrew Braybrook had a background in programming before writing games, and this gave them an edge in the early days of the Spectrum and Commodore 64. “There was no assembler back then, it was all keyed in [using] REM statements,” remembers Steve. “The actual code was hex as well, I’d write it on squared paper, the code down one side and down the other I’d hand-assemble it into hex. Then I had a hex autoloader, which
I’d written myself, which changed the hex into assembler. It allowed me to put labels in, which was a godsend, so I could identify the code using a key.” Avalon was taking shape, and it was clear to its creator that nothing like it had been seen on the Spectrum. “I felt the player needed to feel where they were and interact with things. I thought this was new territory, and was sure it would work.”
With his demo ready, Steve visited Hewson, confident Andrew Hewson, would like what he had to show him. “I had a wizard and three rooms, with doors, walls and a sample object you could open, which was also the wizard as I didn’t have any other graphics.” Fortunately it was enough for the publisher to appreciate this was going to be something special. Continues Steve, “I then made a mock-up of a level with a few more graphics that he could show the press, at the same time twisting his arm to get more royalties.” Steve’s first game, 3D Space Wars, had taken six weeks from start to finish; its sequel double that, and then double again for 3D Lunattack. Also the developer considered his efforts and the potential game to be worthy of an impressive box akin to the products from Ultimate. “It was a way to avoid piracy,” explains Steve, “by making people want to own the whole package, give better perceived value for money.” Hewson’s choice of soft clamshell case was a halfway
compromise, and a (supposedly) photocopierproof code sheet was included to piracy-protect the game. The package was rounded off with a poem and map, both printed on parchment-style paper, and created by Steve himself.
While graphically impressive, it was under the hood where the magic of Avalon really takes place. Even in noted games such as the aforementioned Atic Atac, enemies would be generated randomly within each room the player entered. “I wanted to make the meanies dangerous and semi-intelligent,” says Steve, “And also for them to be grounded in proper physics, to make it as real as I could.” Maroc would start Avalon only able to use his move spell. The theory was for the player to learn about controlling the wizard before collecting the fire spell that meant they could at least fight back. Helpful, as fleeing, was not always a successful solution. “I designed the meanies to follow you,” smiles Steve, “so if you went into another room, they’d soon reappear. In order to lose them, you needed to put more than one room between you and them.” These little complexities are what bring Avalon alive, and each had to be programmed efficiently. “I had a set of movement patterns for each creature depending on how it felt,” recalls Steve. “If they were dressed in armour and powerful, they’d be bold. Others kept their distance until you approached. Many would flee, especially if you cast a spell.” Unable to code specific routines due to memory restrictions, Steve used a stack of eight random numbers that drove the enemy movements, in a cycle that changed every fifth of a second. Playing around with these numbers gave Steve an impressive-looking range of movements
Given the level of commitment and time invested in Avalon, it was Graftgold’s plan to create a series of games based around its base engine. Dragontorc followed a year later, but it was no mere update. “I was thinking constantly of what more I could do with the game, but didn’t want to replace all the systems, just lift them a little bit,” explains Steve. Into the sequel came more spells, greater variety of enemies and afflictions such as poison and blindness. “The races in the game would also act differently, depending on how you behaved towards them. For example, elves were apathetic unless you gave them a gem or a bow, then they’d follow and kill your enemies for you.” This becomes a useful tactic toward the end of the game where invisible opponents plague Maroc. Steve devised another plot for the sequel, once more based in ancient Britain, this time imperiled by a witch known as Morag the shapeshifter. “I worked out the prehistory better this time,” says Steve, “which gave me all the artefacts you needed to try and complete the adventure. I pieced it all together and wrote the poem. I was learning to link it all up better.” The developer had also analysed what gamers found frustrating about Avalon. “There were more spells available from the start; I also made the door frames bigger as people struggled getting through them.” Despite these improvements, Dragontorc failed to improve on its predecessor’s sales. “It was similar to what happened to Gargoyle and its fantasy trilogy,” notes Steve. “They did two games and then sales dropped off. A lot of big sci-fi movies were out, so we, like they, shifted to a space theme.” While Gargoyle created Marsport, Steve produced the brilliant space adventure Astroclone. However, he didn’t forget about his magical trilogy. “At that point it never got much past the initial idea,” he remembers, “but with the advent of the 16-bits
I did try and resurrect it. It had to be completely different in order to avoid copyright problems with Hewson, and we put a prototype together.” The game, Dragonwrath, was based around a young King Arthur, and picked up by publisher Warners, impressed with its multi-layered parallax graphics. “No one else understood it,” laments Steve. “Everyone just wanted polygons, while we had a preprocessed room with these graphics you could move between.” Alas, three months in the publisher got cold feet and pulled the plug.
But no matter; for leaving an indelible mark on ZX Spectrum games history, Steve Turner can be proud. His technical skills ensured classic status for both Avalon and Dragontorc. “We believed in framerate for playability,” he concludes, “And an instantaneous warp between rooms, as loading spoiled the flow. You do it so the data is of a format that can be picked up quickly. It was one of my trademarks.” After Astroclone, fancying a change, Steve had a crack at isometric games with Quazatron. But it’s his brace of arcade adventures that he recalls most fondly. “No other arcade games of the time had the same depth,” he reminisces. “And the interesting thing was it never just dropped off the sales charts . It seemed that when people started playing it, they continued to play it – which is exactly what I wanted them to do.”
“I to wanted make the dangerous meanies and semiintelligent” steve turner that were varied enough to make the player feel they were being stalked, avoided or attacked.