After finishing my Dynablasters/ Bomberman clone Megablasters I wasn’t sure what to do next. I was working on my parts for the Divine Megademo, but I also intended to write another game.

With Rex of BENG I was planing to create a Zombie Fighting game called "Rigor Mortis". But this was looking like it would be a lot of work for either the graphic artist (Rex) and the programmer (me).

So I thought I could do something little inbetween. So I’ve formed a short lived alliance with Siggi of Bollaware. I was playing Cannon Fodder a lot at that time. First on the Amiga of my brother, later on my Acorn Risc PC, which I bought from Leather Rebel on the Inicron Meeting in 1995.

I liked the game, but thought it was a little too hard, especially at the end. I figured that it wouldn’t pose too much of an effort to make a CPC conversion of it. With some nice Mode 1 graphics it could even look very nice and highly detailed. And who would be better for Mode 1 graphics than the Mode 1 graphics artist Siggi from Bollaware, who has created such cool graphics featured in the games Black Land, Fres Attack and later in Fres Fighter II Turbo or in the demos Morphing Through the Ages and Women and Dragons.

I got a disc with the first set of objects after a few days. The graphics looked very promising. I’ve already started to work on the program. As in Megablasters I also wanted to use an overscan mode for the game and so I was already working on a fast sprite routine that wouldn’t need double buffering, but repainted the parts of the screen that would be left over, when the object moved in the opposite direction. This routine had to be fast, so that the objects didn’t start to flicker (or flicker too much for that matter) and so that I was able to display a number of objects at the same time.

When I got the first set of graphics from Siggi I just included the jeep in several different color mixes, so that I could test how fast the software would be with eight objects on the screen. Since I didn’t have this many joysticks or keyboard keys as to move all eight objects at once I’ve mapped four jeeps each to one set of controls, keyboard and joystick 2. Thus I was able to move all eight cars around without being an alien with 32 fingers to press all possible control keys...

The sprite routines were okay, they were able to cross between the border between two sets of regular screens (which were connected in order to provide a complete view in an overscan mode). Everything was fine, so why didn’t this game ever see the light of day?

To be honest, I don’t really remember. I think it was probably that I had started studying in the fall semester of 1995 and during the summer of 1996 I lost more and more of my leisure time to my studies and thus had no more time to continue any of my CPC projects. Moreover the scrolling of the screen would also have required some nice programming to be smooth and without flickering, so maybe this was also a reason for abandoning this project.

It’s too bad, I would have liked to be able to play this game on the CPC. I even intended to insert a nice level editor, so that I didn’t have to create so many levels by myself and that the Amstrad freaks had something to do besides playing the game. But well, that’s the way life goes, isn’t it...