One Classic to Rule Them All!
Dear friends and fans of the Speccy!
Firstly, we warmly congratulate all Spectrum enthusiasts on the upcoming holidays – Christmas, New Year, and another Christmas! We wish you and your families peace and well-being!
I am happy to announce that today we released the new game Lone Lunner, which my team and I at ZX Evolution have been preparing for almost a whole year.
This is a very dynamic and fun classic platformer, inspired by the game Lode Runner, in which the character cleverly climbs ladders to collect gold bars scattered throughout the labyrinth. At the same time, he must avoid encountering danger in the form of two, or sometimes three, guards who are trying to catch our hero and do something bad to him.
The hero is aided by his trusty eternal match, which allows him to burn brick blocks to his left or right. The hero can escape into these holes, as well as trap not very clever guards, who sometimes get out of captivity, and sometimes die. After all, the burnt blocks are restored very quickly.
This game is probably one of the most classic games of all time, and it has already been implemented in one form or another on every platform.
And on the classic Spectrum, you can find about a dozen similar games.
So why did we make another version?
In fact, the level of implementation of Lode Runner type games on the classic Spectrum is depressing. Those who have played it on other platforms do not want to play these semi-amateur monochrome crafts at all. Moreover, in implementing this project, we pursued another goal.
The successor to the Spectrum – the newly made ZX Spectrum Next – is quite popular among retro fans in Europe, but it is almost not common in Russia and other post-Soviet republics. At the same time, the TS Conf project is quite common in the Russian Federation (actually, this is the name of the firmware for the ZX Evolution computer). As it turned out, the platforms are very similar, although they have different hardware implementations.
Our big task was to make these two platforms work together. The result was a concept of architecture and a set of libraries that allows the same program code to be compiled for both platforms simultaneously, with almost no modification.
This concept will be further developed, 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 we also created our own modern setting, which we hope you will also like.
The “artificial intelligence” of the enemies was also written from scratch, and therefore the game became more difficult and interesting. You can choose one of two difficulty modes and even remove the enemies completely (training mode). But to those who completely complete the game in NORMAL mode and do not go crazy at the same time, I suggest erecting a monument during their lifetime 🙂
In general, I urge you to download the game, donate and support the developers with kind words. 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 because the money from there reaches us considerably diminished in its amount. So please don’t judge us too harshly. And even better – buy it on our website! The Robokassa service accepts plastic cards from any country. The Volet e-wallet, after a little bit of dancing around, also easily accepts funds from any European country.
Turtles Fighters
Soon (promised in January 2025), another completely new game based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will be released on our resource. There is not much information about the game yet, but there are already screenshots. The game will be released for the TS Conf and Sprinter platforms.
And that’s all the news for today, thank you for your attention!
