The Making Of: Morpheus
After topping the charts with Uridium, and going combat racing with Alleykat, Andrew Braybrook reinvented the shoot-’em-up. Retro Gamer learns how Andrew’s ambitious shooter Morpheus combined bounty hunting, trading and evolving aliens
Andrew Braybrook on how he created his rock-hard Commodore 64 exclusive
Rather than focusing on a single genre or repurposing mechanics, acclaimed developer Andrew Braybrook spent the mid-eighties designing games that were so eclectic that the only thing they shared in common was just how different they were from one other. This was far from accidental, and so when Andrew opted to make a second deep space shooter towards the decade’s end, he produced a design that was a world apart from his earlier hit Uridium, as he’s keen to point out. “It was important to always try to do a crowd-pleaser, but not be lazy about it,” Andrew considers, “so I tended to do a different sort of game each time.
Morpheus was the first time I had a sprite multiplexor to use, and initially I had a demo floating about 50 sprites around the screen. The downside was that fast scrolling became out of the question at 50 frames a second. I therefore chose to
not scroll the screen and use another technique to show movement instead. Then other graphical experiments with grey shades gave me a metallic look.”
The series of increasingly large ships that Andrew designed for Morpheus were a primary beneficiary of this new aesthetic, and the developer decided to make these less agile and more durable
than Uridium’s Manta craft. “The Morpheus ships were much bigger, implying that they would be heavier and less manoeuvrable than the Mantas,” Andrew argues. “The control mode was still fundamental to the game, but this time I was trying to get movement in all directions. And a big ship against little meanies being able to survive multiple hits just made sense.”
But besides providing greater protection from enemy attacks, the bulky space cruisers that
Andrew was designing for his latest project also had the capacity to accommodate a wealth of upgrades.
“Morpheus was all about choosing your ship add-ons and controlling your extra weapons,” Andrew explains. “It was all down to
The control mode was still fundamental to the game, but this time I was trying to get movement in all directions Andrew Braybrook
having a more complex game model where many of the add-ons were necessarily connected together. So the player got to choose a shield emitter, and then had to power it somehow. They could get a battery, but then they needed to have a solar cell to charge it.”
This impressive selection of accessories would be metered out via a trading system, although a design decision resulted in the power-ups receiving slightly cryptic on-screen descriptions consisting of two letters followed by a number designating their efficiency. “The font was so big that I had to keep everything brief!” Andrew grins.
“But the codes told you what you were buying. I had been playing
Rescue On Fractalus, and couldn’t detect much difference in the recovered spare parts, so I wanted to try out my own system. The later items represented developments of technology as the game stepped up, and you needed to buy the better new parts to cope with the increasing difficulty.”
As well as operational upgrades such as shield and energy generators, Andrew also devised armaments to complement his game’s standard weapon, including multidirectional blasters and remote drones, which additionally kept
Morpheus pilots fit. “I imagined my system was like one person running across the ship to operate another feature,” Andrew reasons. “I was trying to give the player control over movement of the ship and also movement within the ship to be able to fire better weapons on demand. So although the main weapon only fired in one direction in one place, the player could buy more flexible directional weapons that would be more effective.”
Of course the weapons in
Morpheus required targets, and so Andrew devised a race of aliens called Morphai, that rather than patrolling open space would hide in globe-shaped ‘orbitals’ then spill out when their hosts were attacked. “If you had seen a crowd of Morphai you might have been tempted to just wait until they pushed off,” Andrew contends, “and that would have been counter-productive as time was of the essence. So for direct cause and effect it was better that the player could plan a strategy, and know when and how they were going to be attacked. So I was drawing the player to the orbitals, but they didn’t know exactly what was going to happen next.”
One of the biggest unknowns of attacking orbitals would be not knowing which of the many Morphai that Andrew was designing would emerge to defend their host, which due to limited screen space were fairly intelligent even in their unevolved states. “I was concerned that Alleykat had only had a few different enemies,” Andrew admits, “so for Morpheus I wanted more different types of sprites with less animation frames. I could control the behaviour of them with a few bytes, so they were more economical.
But at the same time, they had to be smart enough not to just crash into the player’s ship, which itself occupied a lot of the screen, giving me not so many options on where they could go.”
Although far from cannon fodder in their embryonic forms, Andrew felt that his game would benefit from the Morphai evolving fighting skills and immunity to weapons over time, for which he partially credits his former colleague. “Partly this was exposure to some of Steve Turner’s games,” Andrew reflects, “where he was getting involved in algorithms to control different races of game creatures – I didn’t want to go that far, but I wanted to get the same kinds of effects and behaviour, and partly it was an incentive to keep the player buying new weapons as they become available, since they would actually need them.”
Although Andrew’s evolving aliens would have likely driven ingame weapons sales even if he had restricted them to orbital defence duties, the developer made sure business was brisk by deploying upgrade-destroying Morphai throughout his game. “I realised that players might be prudent to buy defensive add-ons for their small
ship,” Andrew recollects, “but that the add-ons could be destroyed leaving the player with no add-ons that could fire. I didn’t want that to stop the player from progressing, so the main weapon needed to always be available. The more advanced weapons then needed to be better, or the player wouldn’t use them.”
Then for practical reasons, Andrew restricted orbital destruction to the now permanently fitted standard plasma beam while additionally allowing its use for in-flight attacks on opponents. “The point of the main weapon was that it had a fixed direction of fire, so that the joystick still controlled the ship,” Andrew points out. “You couldn’t easily steer the ship and fire the add-on weapons, as the direction of the stick then only controlled the direction of fire, so they were really just for defence.”
Since weapon upgrades – as with the other accessories in Morpheus
– had to be bought between levels, Andrew needed a way for players to raise funds, and so he decided to put bounties on the heads of his game’s alien foes. “The finances were essentially supplied by collapsing the orbitals,” Andrew observes, “keeping the player’s mind on progression. I had been playing some board games where you could order ships, and the better ships cost more and took longer to make. That made me think about the economics of mounting a campaign. I liked that better than just finding items. So the add-ons in Morpheus became available in a set sequence at set times, allowing players to learn what was coming.”
In order to time the delivery of the power-ups in Morpheus, Andrew devised units of time that he called timeslices, which he additionally measured players’ progress against. “I was after a more fluid process than just one level after another,” Andrew muses. “The timeslices controlled which add-ons became available, but also there were a fixed number of add-ons, so you had to manage their use in the time available. As the game went along, you needed to get more orbitals to collapse each zone, which took longer, especially if the layout was random or a squadron of meanies bowled up and you had to defend yourself. The Morphai would further harass a slow player, probably to the point that they got so distracted that they were delayed further!”
After finalising the last few elements of gameplay for Morpheus,
Andrew put together an instructive title sequence as a finishing touch, but a subsequent change of publisher resulted in a court case that delayed his game’s release. “We had received credible evidence that
Morpheus was going to be released by Hewson Consultants,” Andrew says with a sigh, ”albeit we may have been baited, so Telecomsoft needed to act to ensure it was the rightful sole publisher. Ultimately, an out-of-court deal was done between the publishers so that we could take Morpheus away, and there would be a later hearing to decide how much compensation there would be, based on its sales.” Although three months late,
Morpheus nonetheless wowed many reviewers at the time, even if its complexity caused a few to caution players to try the game before buying it. “I wasn’t really aware of any negative publicity at the time,” Andrew recalls, “but of course it had lost some momentum since the ‘Diary Of A Game’ articles.
Morpheus was a bit of a complicated game as regards its construction and unusual display, not being a traditional scroller, so we tried to make sure that reviewers had plenty of time to give it a thorough test.”
Decades after its release, Andrew reviews
Morpheus with pride, and concludes that for every instance that his innovative shooter falls slightly short it excels in other areas. “I think it’s a bit simplistic in some aspects,” Andrew concedes, “but it’s quite complex in how all the add-ons interact. I had a nice three-layer parallax effect for the scaffolding at the docking station, and it melted away as you beamed out, I think that’s neat. I should have used the moving star system to do more explosion bits, but I figured I had a lot of sprites so I didn’t need to.
Morpheus isn’t an immediate game, but it’s a toughie to beat. There’s a lot of clever stuff in there, even if it doesn’t have enough opportunity to show it all off.”
I was trying to give the player control over movement of the ship and also movement within the ship to be able to fire better weapons on demand Andrew Braybrook