Posted By
Doug
on 2001-12-20
|  You are welcome
James & Lando,
I never realised my games had so much of a following! Well, actually I kind of suspected, which is why I sought out this site. A few days ago I was chatting with a guy here at work (I now design and write operating systems to go in set-top-boxes and other embedded toys - great fun!!) and the conversation got on to the old 8 bit machines. His chin hit the floor when I said that I wrote Icicle Works; a reaction I was not expecting! So I thought I'd have a dig on the 'net and see what was happening with them.
I wrote Icicle Works (and a ton of other stuff) during a year off from university. The 8 bit games market was screaming, and there was so much fun to be had, I could not waste my time in a stuffy lecture theatre. Icicle Works was a commision from Commodore, and I did it for Plus/4 and C64 (not sure if this version ever saw the light of day). My initial version was (in my opinion) superior to the version that shipped. It used the full screen, and did 2D smooth scrolling - NICE. Trouble was you could not see the toys being built up as you progressed. I was persuaded to move to the version we see today, but I still recon the first one was the best.
I think I still have the source for these games somewhere (hardcopy). Bet they are mouldy by now!
Fingers Malone and Prospector Pete were banged out in a few weeks each when I returned to university (Southampton Uni actually, Lando). They provided much needed beer money! Glad you liked Fingers - it was fun designing the levels. I can't play it at all now!!! Prospector Pete was an interesting technical challenge - the flood algorithm took some thinking about, as did the sprites. Sorry to see such a poorly hacked version on the 'net. But I did deliberately make that one hard to copy, so I'm not surprised to see some of the graphics corrupted.
Much of the other stuff I did back then was not so glamorous as gaming. I did a lot of consultancy work, and wrote a bunch of turbo loaders - Burner for the C64, followed later on by Vecta load, also for the C64, which had a tape and disk version. The disk version was used on C64 Elite. Remember those crazy buz bars it used to generate while loading? The annoying thing is that I would do it all much differently (and far faster) now!
Keep up the good work & Merry Christmas!
Doug.
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