One classic to rule them all!

Dear friends and fans of the Speccy!

First of all, we warmly congratulate all Spectrum enthusiasts on the upcoming holidays - Christmas, New Year and another Christmas! We wish you and your families peace and goodwill!

I am glad to inform you that today a new game Lone Lunner has been released, which we and the ZX Evolution team have been preparing for release for almost a whole year. It is a very dynamic and fun classic platformer, created in the spirit of Lode Runner, in which the character nimbly climbs ladders collecting gold bars scattered around the maze. At the same time, he must avoid encounters with danger in the form of two, and sometimes three guards, who are eager to catch up with our hero and do something bad to him.

The hero is helped by his faithful eternal matchstick, which allows him to burn through brick blocks to his left or right. The hero can escape into these resulting holes himself, as well as trap in them the not-so-clever guards, who sometimes escape from captivity and sometimes perish. After all, the burned-through blocks are restored very quickly.

This game is probably one of the most classic of all time in the history of game development, and it has already been implemented in one form or another on every platform. Even on the classic Spectrum you can find a dozen similar games.

So why did we make another version?

In fact, the quality of Lode Runner-style games on the classic Spectrum is depressing. Those who have played it on other platforms do not want to play these semi-amateur monochrome creations at all. In addition, while implementing this project we pursued another goal.

The successor to the Spectrum - the new ZX Spectrum Next - is quite popular among retro fans in Europe, but is almost completely unknown in Russia and other post-Soviet republics. At the same time, in Russia a project called TS Conf (actually the name of the firmware for the ZX Evolution computer) is quite widespread.

As it turned out, the platforms are very similar, although they have different hardware implementations. Bringing these two platforms together was a big task for us. The result was an architecture concept and a set of libraries that allow the same program code to be built for both platforms simultaneously with virtually no modification. This concept will be further refined, but we are already using it in our next project (which I will talk about in the next article).

In our implementation of Lone Lunner we used the best classic graphics from the NES version of the game, and also created our own modern setting, which we hope you will also like. The enemies' "artificial intelligence" was also written from scratch, and therefore the game has become harder and more interesting. You can choose one of two difficulty modes and even remove enemies entirely (training mode). But for those who fully complete the game in NORMAL mode and do not go insane in the process, I propose erecting a monument to them while they are still alive 🙂

In short, I encourage you to download the game, donate and support the developers with a kind word. This is very important in our difficult times. The game is available both on ZX Online and on itch.io. We have to set a higher price per copy on itch.io, since the money from there reaches us having lost a considerable amount along the way. So please don't judge us harshly. Even better - buy it on our website! The Robokassa service accepts foreign cards from any country. The Volet e-wallet, after a little song and dance, also easily accepts funds from any European country.

Turtles Fighters

Soon (promised in January 2025) another completely new game will be released on our resource, which is based on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There is not much information about the game yet, but screenshots are already available. The game will be released for the TS Conf and Sprinter platforms. And that's all the news for today, thanks for your attention!