In ancient times, there was a kid who acquired an old tome for its cover.

The tome taught many mystical spells and lucky was the kid as one of them was a very powerful one.

But good mojo tends not to strike the same spot twice and soon he realized the spells failed.

Fearing shame from the whole ordeal, the kid set into a crusade to solve the powerful spell´s riddle.

It was written in a similar dialect he knew so with time and help from other forgotten scrolls,

he eventually mastered what is one of the most powerful reality creation spells.

Romance aside, the old tome´s cover I´m talking about is this one here:

What a strange time for file transfer the 80s were, one would share an app by printing its code on paper, then send it through post and then the receiving part would retype that code and voila! File downloaded! :D

The Zx spectrum and TRS-80 color versions

It plays similar to ROGUE, CHASE or ROBOTS, say, turn based: you move, the rest moves, repeat, and you have to perform a certain number of moves on the map till a time expires (60 turns) while avoiding the skeletons hunting you. The map has random crosses which block both player and enemie´s path and you can create up to 5 holes that will also block enemies. You can get an idea by reading the description and instructions on the book under the game´s title.

Here is a neat link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chase_(video_game)

The structure to be used on this revamped version:

Overall, I want low resolution low palette pixel graphics, some level of animation, sound and music, maybe music only at the title and some mood stuff for in game, better controls, a game over and won celebration screens as well as title and credits.

Here is a layout of what I think to be more or less all the sprites and tiles I will need in game.

Dotted black grid is just an overlay guide, but I´m quite happy with all proportions.

Notice the game map increased from 20x10 to 20X12, I also will be using less tombs then the original ~10 or less instead of 20.

One may think the world area is quite small, but since everyone moves separately, you can´t have 200 foes and wait for them all to move to play again, so one has to balance max amount of enemies tolerable against game world area, I didn´t think of that in my first thoughts.

Here are the sprites, player and enemies, and a tile set to create the sematary.

Code started, the more boring part is done, like control and display handling, debugging areas, code intending purely for aesthetics, etc. Added the FUED intro as well as a temporary title screen worked of from the book illustrations. Original author´s name is Rob McCaig.

Added a venetian blind transition effect between screens going about the same size as the game´s board tiles, should look sleek. Here it is in slow motion, should be 4 times faster on final version.

As we now get into the real game, let´s first implement a simpler game mode.

Added sematary closed exit gates, which will open should you find its key and will lead you to freedom.

Here is the level generator, its order goes like:

• Draw the surrounding walls

• Choose up to 3 grid wall areas on each up and lower horizontal walls, each can contain up to 3 grid wall tiles

• Choose a gate position on the lower horizontal wall, add grid walls to each side

• Put a set of ground bricks in front of the gate

• Spread 8 tombs around the semaraty

• Choose up to 11 big ground block locations and choose if each 4 sides should have a smaller ground block

• Spread 2 types of ground foliage

You can see the process going on the GIF and the numbers behind the curtains.

As with the skeletons (be zombies on this one), I thought they could slowly raise from the graves as turns go by.

Player is also moving about and collides with walls and tombs, and so does the zombies, now to fix tomb positioning so they don´t appear just above another. They should also not spawn if someone is on that spot.

Notice the layout is designed to avoid having to draw scenery on the foreground, but that won´t cut for the sprites so I have to figure out a Z system to sort them, like the lower on screen the sprite is, the higher its priority when drawing, so no one overlaps each other wrongly.

Here is a general movement test:

The zombie´s intelligence is up and running and based on 3 distinct distances to the player. You can see squares around the player to mark the regions, zombies close by will hunt you more eagerly, and will also shake wildly.

Now you can dig!

Other than the title, here is the win and loose (scared) screens.

Zombies are now attacking, they push you back if the space is vacant, they can push you in your own hole. Made 2 types of falling animation, will use the faster one though the paused one is charming.

I will try to keep the game view free of HUDs. The player will have a set of lives as level of scariness, like the stiff-o-meter! His idle animation shows his level of stress.

The joys of bugs! :D

Player, gates and key should be placed randomly. They follow these rules:

• Gates in the middle -> player spawns on one side and key on the other.

• Gates on the sides - > player at the same region and key on the opposite side.

• The key also only spawns on the semetary upper area, player on the lower. This works nice to level the game challenge and avoid full randomization which could generate easy to solve levels.

Now that we have enough game elements working, let´s extend the game further. First, a richer level generator that can produce levels like the layout example. This is tricky for 3 reasons:

• Used perspective is weird, wall fronts don´t work with diagonally placed top walls. Matrix fail.

• I don´t want fully enclosed wasted areas.

• I don´t want graves to pop out on the "outside" of the playable area.

So here is how the newer map system goes by:

• First, clear the whole map with clear ground tile 0.

• Snake around counter clockwise a wall path using 3 cells, tending to stay on the outside cell.

• Do an array clean up for loose holes and protuberances.

• Create a set of linear, maybe holed, walls from each of the sides, caring not to create more than 2 enclosed corner areas.

• Set gate position.

• Fix the inverted Y shape on the array, causes problems every now and then.

• Generate horizontal metal fences.

• Extrude walls and fences.

• Generate holes

• Do a flood fill starting from the semetary gate to generate a playable area array.

• If the flood reaches the borders, the map is a fail, do it again.

• Position tombs on the playable area.

• Position player and keys on the playable area.

There where lots of fine tuning hidden through the process and the hardest one was about positioning the tombs, as they already had a set of rules and would need to have another one over. Overall, the combined engines seem to produce neat safe levels!

Here is a bit of map stress testing, failed levels should be discarded.

I want a form of active attack, other than the passive "weapon" holes (they are similar to mines).

So if a zombie is on a close cell, and you try to dig a hole in his direction, you will swing the shovel, hit the zombie and push him back a few cells. This gets a bit tricky since I want a pushed back zombie to bump onto others and so on like a domino effect.

Another change, the player can now destroy the graves. It has two stages of destruction and if fully destroyed, the path becomes walkable (zombies will still pop out). Zombies won´t raise if the location is dug, though you still can only do so 5 times (there are 10 graves), but attack with the shovel is infinite.

Bumping about working quite nice now as well as zombies falling into the ground if they hit a wall or a blocked path they can´t flow. They spend 2 turns to stand up.

Added some treasures and ´health´ potions the zombies may drop.

Added a sort of time limit to spice up the tension. As the game reaches turn 60, 3 holes will appear on map, and from this point on, every adjacent block to a existing hole may crumble per turn. This creates great momentum! Brings me memories about the ALASKA board game, where I got this idea from.

Experienced a lot of trouble with the bounce back code, mostly because of its real time nature clashing with the turn based system. I didn´t predict that amount of troubles but a few I did, like perpetual machines:

With the bounce back code fixed, time to polish the GFX, also made every zombie available unique, but not their clothes, they all go about dressing like the hulk. A score system is also up.

Here is how the bounce back code works in game. Whenever you hit a zombie, he will fly back up to 3 blocks if free, will fall down if a tomb or wall is on the way. He will also fall if he hits another zombie and this one has no free blocks sideways, in which case this other zombie will also fall down. If the other zombie has free sideways blocks, he will be pushed 2 blocks towards that direction while the original hit zombie continues to travel backwards. This provides a good domino effect with a certain level of being predicted. You also gain some ground over the zombie wave.

Your objective is to get the key and escape, but that kind of does not score. Your score is based on the treasures you pick up and they have a chance of appearing as more zombies are on screen. To increase the amount of zombies on screen you have to crack tombs.

The treasure system goes like this:

# of cracked tombs treasure that can appear

2 coins

4 silver bar

6 gold bar

8 diamond ring

10 pyra handheld

Treasures are mostly based on the Pitfall! ones :)

The system for amount of zombies goes like this:

game turn # of zombie

1 2

40 3

60 4

80 5

100 6

120 7

Each treasure you get adds another zombie, get them all, +5 zombies in game. Get the key and it adds another zombie. So in total, over turn 120 and with all treasures, one might have to face 13 zombies.

The more zombies on screen, higher the chance one will drop a treasure very far away. If the level is already collapsing, one needs to be jonh wick to be able to retrieve it, hence digging in front of some tombs to prevent zombies to raise there. This might sound like spoiler...but wont make the game any easier. more zombies will raise close to you.

As for sound fxs, you get standard 8 bit stuff, some of them are more realistic as I sampled them myself.

As for music, it is a little dynamic in game as it changes when the key is collected and when turn 60 is reached and the level starts collapsing. Music was done by Gundatsch.

Check his excellent work here: https://soundcloud.com/gundatsch

Trailer and gameplay videos below:

The game can be purchased at itchio here:

https://ericomont.itch.io/gravediggerex

There is a free Pandora handheld version available here:

https://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=gravediggerex.fued