Posted By
Csabo
on 2021-03-26
09:35:42
|  Re: Kayleth!
There's a few things I wanted to talk about (without making the news item too long).
#1 First off, about this release. Be warned, minor spoilers ahead!
This is no mere conversion, I'd call it a "deluxe conversion"  Two obvious things are the new title screen and the included manual. When I worked on Temple of Terror - that game was a mess. Couldn't be completed, typos galore, etc. In terms of game logic and writing - Kayleth has none of those issues, it's a masterpiece. The game's graphics engine has been improved by a lot though; much faster text and graphics rendering. I mentioned the good reviews, but there were complaints of course. Well, let's just leave at this: if you have time, try to load up the C64 version. On the very first screen, try to type something... it's actually very difficult (due to the graphics animation)! Our version doesn't have this issue at all. Another complaint was that at least in one case, the text description didn't match what was drawn. This example was the color of an eye. But why is such a small detail so important, you might ask? Well, in this case, it is: in the game you play an android, and you can become different types. Your eye color reflects this, and only certain types of androids are allowed in certain places. So, this was fixed.
Another issue: while looking at the code, I noticed that in the graphics engine there's was special handling for just one room, a separate subroutine was called. That routine however did nothing - it was a simple RETURN statement. After checking the ZX Spectrum version, I realized what happened: in that room, there's bitmap level scrolling, and I guess the developers got lazy or ran out of memory to implement this. I re-coded that part from scratch. It's a very minor thing... but it looks really neat
One final thing (without spoiling it), during the very end of the game, there's a description about something that happens, but the screen does not reflect this. I felt that this was anti-climactic. I ended up adding a new command into the game's engine to rectify this. I really hope someone will actually see it All in all, this conversion is better than any of the originals.
With all that out of the way...
#2 I want to join KiCHY in saying that this is my last text adventure conversion. Why? It's simple: I feel like there's too many text adventures already. The ones that got released in the last 18 months or so barely got feedback. Or here's another thing to consider: when zbyti recently created a topic about what genre of games people want, no-one said text adventures. (Funny that in the other thread, "The Pawn" came up. I tried that game, but it's sooo slow... Not really fun to play. And 3 disk sides?! Gosh.)
Don't fret, this just means more logic/action games Or who knows, it's not written in stone.
Thanks to Chronos for the graphics, and everyone who helped in testing. Now go enjoy Kayleth! (BTW, there's a built-in "sneak-peek" feature, so even if you don't want to play, you can load up the game and get a preview of some of the scenes that take place later.)
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