Use F1/F2/F3/HELP ingame to alter both TED and SID volumes.
Description
"XeO3 - Xenon Trioxide" represents the comeback of Mike Dailly where his whole career as a videogames creator has begun, after having made his own CV quite a notable one. With the help of Luca/FIRE, which has run in the Plus/4 scene for enough time to be tagged as veteran, once back to the origins, he'd found new potential to create a game about which the Plus/4 user could say he has never seen before something similar on the machine. Innovative addons like the SIDcard would make this task easier, too.
The project ----------------
The whole project is based on a core code which is capable to manage a double buffered 40x21 chars area scrolling at 25 Hz (2 frames), while moving a dozen 2x2 software sprites or more; it also features continuous animation for the turrets and the mines and periodic animation in some parts of the background; plus, there's the chance of moving around big packs of characters (thinking about big bosses).
All the different levels in the game would include a sub-boss in the middle of the level (the scrolling stops there till he's gone), and a big boss in the end. As the sub-boss is certainly built up with software sprites, it's still uncertain how the big boss should be done (characters most probably, or chars+sprites).
The gameplay is based on the weaponry system. It includes 4 weapons which can be improved along 6 grades overall. Player starts with Plain Shot, then pickups give him Energy Blade, Laser, Plasma Ball (other pickups: Rear Shot, Upper Shot, Lower Shot, Speedup, Shield). These weapons are different in: speed, power, bullets, size. In order to preserve the weapon's level, the player must refuel a constantly decreasing Powerbar, completing the Coinbar (both on the right part of the game panel) that allows to have a whole powerbar back. If the powerbar reaches zero, your weapon's level decreases by 1 and restarts from full bar. It could get down to level 1, in which there's no active powerbar (it shuts off). The Powerbar works this way: - get full coins in the green bit -> power up - get full coins in the red bit - > you recharge - no coins before bar runs out -> downgrades weapon - no coins before bar runs out on weapon's lowest grade -> bar stays zero.
The real target Mike Dailly would have reached in the very end of the project, is to have a source code which any user can edit and change by using a dedicated script, in order to create his own shmup game. The author was also fascinated by the idea of porting the same game on different machines. Here follow some videos about various additional conversions: - a C64 straight porting of the game, [video]; - Russel Kay did some early tests to show silky scrolling on ZX Spectrum, [video]; - an Amstrad CPC464 porting of the Level 1 map, [video]; - recently Mike Dailly used the game's graphics to show it on ZX Spectrum Next, [video]; - an Atari800 conversion based on both hardware and software sprites has been done too.
What till now ------------------ [Written on 2018-09-27] On 2006-09-30, a non-playable teaser, showing some alien waves over the current Level 1, has been released just to collect suggestions and criticism from the audience. Thank to all the feedback received too, a playable Test demo have been released later, on 2008-06-13, with no real boss to fight, moving into a test level mapped for that specific usage. Promptly, the audience responded quickly and in a costructive way, so good to implement some important features and fixes few days later, in Test demo V2.
Just after this release, and a couple of attempts around the code, Mike Dailly has put the whole project in sleeping state, due to some very time absorbing ventures about his job, which now look as quite succesful enterprises. In this long idle time, very little has been made around the project: some conversion of the graphics sources in order to manage the levels' graphics with modern tools, a quick test about the forthcoming Level 2 (see video below), an improvement of the game's panel.
However, the author has been interviewed several times in the last years, and in any of those interviews, he never missed to consider the XeO3 project as "still alive" and "to be completed one time". In Retro Gamer 152 he explicitedly said that again, to answer two separate questions.
