The Making Of: Intensity
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Andrew Braybrook looks back at Graftgold’s challenging C64 puzzler
Contrary to popular belief, former Graftgold coder Andrew Braybrook’s debut tile for Rainbird Software – Morpheus – was very well received by the majority of magazine
reviewers at the time. That said, most write-ups on the game added a caveat that since Morpheus was so different it wouldn’t be for everyone. But rather than playing it safe with his subsequent project, Andrew instead opted to put together ideas for a game that would be every bit as original as its predecessor. “Morpheus had a difficult birth, what with the publisher change at the end and rebadging it for Rainbird,” Andrew concedes. “But I always tried to follow my nose, rather than taking much advice. By the time I finished a game I had learned how to play it, which possibly led me to think that it was too easy, at the same time I felt pressured to ensure that there was more ‘game’ in there than the previous one. But I knew that it was impossible to please everyone.”
Having chosen to trust his instincts, the designer decided that his latest project – Intensity – should buck the trend of his previous C64 originals by having fixed-screen levels, rather than scrolling ones. “I wanted to use the whole screen for the game,” Andrew reasons, “and I was dead set on a 50 frames per second approach; there was no other. But if you wanted to scroll the fullscreen then there wasn’t a lot of time for anything else, so I decided that ‘no scrolling’ was the way to go, and that led me to a tight puzzle aspect.”
Puzzles were another first for Andrew, and although the outer space setting he chose for Intensity put him on familiar ground, he opted to have two player-controlled craft in his game rather than one, unlike any of his past projects. “I was heading towards a puzzle game, and the ‘two ships’ idea set that up,” the developer explains. “The ‘skimmer’ was the controller and defender, and the ‘drone’ was a rescue ship. The layout of the platforms had more of a 3D feel because the height of the obstacles became important – since parts of the landscape couldn’t be crossed by the cheaper drones and skimmers. And by having to use the skimmer to move the drone it loaded the player with another task to do.”
A further differentiation between Intensity and Andrew’s previous games followed, as the designer gave his latest project’s skimmer craft offensive collision capabilities rather than a range weapon. “I was pretty sure that I didn’t want bullets in this game,” Andrew asserts. “I wanted the player to have to drive the skimmer at the meanies while also avoiding their drone. Bullets would probably have made life a lot easier for me, but they would have had to be done in characters, and they would have had to go in all 256 directions!”
Perhaps feeling the need to balance Intensity’s many innovations with some inspiration, Andrew designed alien opponents for his work in progress that referenced his earliest C64 original and a seminal movie franchise. “The mutating aliens were a nod to Gribbly’s Day Out in a way,” Andrew notes, “I liked the idea of a single, competing disorganised species. I expect that the Alien and Aliens movies were still bubbling away at the back of my mind too. It was about giving the player multiple tasks to do so that they would have to prioritise what they were doing all the time, as the different evolutionary stages of the meanies targeted either the colonists or the ships. They were vulnerable for a while as a Podule, but you knew if you didn’t deal with those then they would become something nastier.”
In fact, the Podules’ nastier form was a little too nasty, and so Andrew worked out a way to scale back the hazard posed by Intensity’s overly deadly Trackers. “If the last evolutionary stage – the Trackers – headed straight for the drone they would inevitably get there before you could call it to a safer place,” remembers Andrew. “So I had to come up with a zigzag attack pattern for them,
which made them tough to intercept but gave you time to think about your approach.”
But while the developer was prepared to make concessions to difficulty, he was also keen to broaden Intensity’s challenge, and so to divide players’ attentions he gave them colonists to rescue and ‘resource units’ to collect. “Rescuing a space station crew, with the meanies focusing mainly on getting them rather than the player, spread the focus over more of the screen,” Andrew considers, “and the releasing of ‘currency’ when enough people had been rescued gave the player something else to think about.”
Of course, Intensity’s currency needed a purpose, and so instead of an upgrade system like the ones in his previous games, Andrew devised trading levels where players could buy replacement skimmers and drones. “I wanted to try something different than just getting lives for accruing points,” the developer muses. “It muddied the waters when you had two ships – did you get one of each when you had scored enough points or did you alternate between getting one or the other? I also tried to think of a different way of doing stuff each time, and the fact that I nearly ran out of space with Intensity
confirmed that there probably wasn’t any space for a sub-game.”
But rather than settling for simple upgrade stages with standard skimmer and drone replacements available for a set cost, Andrew introduced an element of strategy by offering three grades of each craft with correspondingly high, medium and low price tags. “You had to order up new ships, having to pick which type you wanted, with the best high-flying ones costing more and taking longer to build,” Andrew recollects. “If you were short on drones then you might have to buy a cheap one to get it quickly, which were then a liability on some of the tougher levels – the better drones and skimmers made the game a lot easier. Once you had learned how not to crash, you should have been trying to use the best gear that you could.”
On Intensity making players wait longer for more expensive craft to be constructed, Andrew credits the game’s predecessor and two other titles as the main inspirations for the mechanic’s inclusion. “There were some different approaches in Morpheus such as ordering new ship parts that you had to wait for,” Andrew reflects, “and I had previously bought two board games called Imperium and Dark Nebula that had a ship-ordering system where you had to wait for ships to be built – longer for the big stuff. I liked that you had to plan ahead and organise your spending, so I reused that in Intensity in simplified form – even though it was a bit odd for a rescue mission!”
In keeping with this slightly unorthodox approach, the developer decided to give Intensity a chart depicting multiple difficulty strands that could be jumped between by rescuing set-numbers of colonists on certain stages. “The map showed five arms heading to the escape ships,” Andrew explains, “the arms from top to bottom were Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon. The Alpha top levels were tougher than the Epsilon lower ones, and you had to work harder to get to them. You were going to get more points on the Alpha levels, but you had to rescue more colonists to keep opening the exits to those levels. The levels didn’t all have exits up and down and forwards, so it was a bit of a maze too.”
But far from just being a maze requiring navigation, Intensity’s matrix of graded levels also allowed players of all skills to beat the game as well as offering numerous alternative paths to the game’s completion. “Since you could mostly choose your route, it meant that if you got a bogey level that you didn’t like then you could avoid it,” Andrew says, “you only had to get to one of the five escape ships on the right. It also meant that to see all the levels you would have to play the game five different ways.”
With Intensity’s inventive nonlinear level progression in place, Andrew additionally managed to squeeze one final innovation into his nearcomplete project – a fullscreen animated tutorial that ran while the game was loading. “The tape loader ran on interrupts, so we had most of the CPU available to do something during the load,” Andrew observes. “I really liked what we did there as it showed what the game was about in giant scale!”
But despite Intensity ’s original design, its lacklustre reviews and sales that it attracted on its release left its developer feeling disappointed. “Intensity got a bit of a roasting from some reviewers,” Andrew admits. “I think they were all bored with 8-bit and didn’t really get into the game. It was our policy to take the game around to as many magazines as we could to show them how to play it […] that usually meant that we would get a fairer review, but we couldn’t get to everyone.”
Decades later, the renowned C64 developer has a few changes he would like to make to his puzzler, but he’s clearly still proud of Intensity and genuinely pleased with the reputation that its gained over the years. “Given the limitations of the C64 there’s not much I could change,” Andrew argues. “The skimmer bouncing against the screen edges always annoyed me, but despite trying a number of alternatives I couldn’t come up with a satisfactory solution that maintained its speed. The giant ‘Rs’ feel a little crude to me; maybe they needed a more animated and pictorial representation. But I’m surprised anyone remembers Intensity, as it didn’t sell very well, so it’s nice that it hasn’t disappeared without trace and that people are getting some enjoyment out of it.”
i’m surprised anyone remembers intensity, as it didn’t sell very well, so it’s nice that it hasn’t disappeared without trace Andrew Braybrook