ROBERT TROUGHTON
How did your Sabre Wulf project start? I’d seen Jon Eggelton’s reimagining of a loader screen – and he’d redrawn a lot of the in-game graphics too. I thought I could just replace the old graphics with new ones – how hard could it be? I needed to find extra memory and the screen-draw routine was using the most inefficient routine imaginable. I realised that it would be more work to patch the game than to rewrite it… and Jon was happy with the idea too.
What is your development environment like and who else is involved?
Much of the work is in C++ – for converting graphics, generating tables, etc. I use Visual Studio Professional along with Kick Ass 6510 assembler, Github, Sparkle (our demo group’s disk-loading system), and SPOT (for optimising graphics). A script builds the entire game, or only parts that have changed, and creates a disk image to test.
We have Jon Eggelton doing design and graphics, Psych858o
(Marcin Majdzik) on audio, and Sparta for advice on compression and loading (he wrote Sparkle). I’m using a few demo tricks to make this game faster and smoother. We have a ‘bitmap scroll’ intro as Sabreman falls into the jungle – with parallax trees and credits on top.
Are there any major gameplay changes?
The gameplay code is completely rewritten. We’re trying to keep the best bits with some improvements, only changing bits we felt were missing, or those which we hated. We’ve extended the screen to 320x200px in size compared to the original’s 256x184px. We’ve added a map screen, and we’ve made the player character movement much smoother and more responsive.
The original used software sprites in places and those were badly done (flickering and jerky on the screen). We’re only using hardware sprites so it’s all going to feel a lot cleaner. We could be finished sometime around mid-2024, maybe a little earlier, if we can keep this momentum going.