My entry to MSXdev’21 is a reuse of my adventure game engine from the last round. I’ll try to find the time to polish it up a bit more, but I expect to be busy and tired with work for August. [url=Here's the current working version; I haven't submitted it to MSXdev yet (for example, I need to check if I can drop the empty pages from the ROM file).
From the player’s perspective, this is made of three chapters and about three times as long as Jäästä. The story is scifi instead of the lighthearted fluff in Jäästä. Still no saving or passwords, but each chapter is about as long as Jäästä.
From the technical perspective -- the game uses five 16KB pages. One page has all the code (with room to spare), another has the title screen and UI graphics (with room to spare), and the last three have one chapter each. That’s what I get for not doing support for multiple pages “properly” the first time around and allowing data to be split over multiple pages per chapter.
Technical changes were limiting the episode to just one page (Jäästä was partially on the same page as the code), allowing multiple locations to share the same image without redefining the same image twice (saves a lot of ROM space), some new script commands (like splitting text automatically to multiple screenfuls, returning to main menu), and
automated compilation of multiple chapters etc to fit in one ROM file.
The game is pretty much done, I’m just adding more “flavour” there in chapters 1 and 3 -- text, characters and items that aren’t needed to finish the game but build up the world a bit more.
I’m writing a longer blog entry on this, but it might take a while to be finished.
Screenshots: title, actual gameplay.
