Andrew Braybrook

I did get messages that some people couldn`t complete the demo disk version, so they didn`t feel the need to play the proper game. The ship was about a six-decker. Of course, without a manual some people might have only figured out to try to shoot everything and not transfer. That won`t get far.

I just don't want to be ruled by the machines. I am the master, and THEY WILL OBEY ME.

Cheers. I found the old diary notes and typed them back in last year for publication by Fusion Retro Books. To be released soon. The first quarter of the diaries in Zzap! were "edited", so now they have been restored to my words. I added some extra notes too. It was a fast development!

One of the ships, deliberate of course, was the same. There was a smaller one before it, and the 3 after are different and larger. Then there`s a secret last Easter-egg ship if you do a certain thing on each ship.
Plus, there was a demo disk with another ship on it that might look familiar.

That's OK. My TV remote can adjust the amp volume, which we want. It's just that the Philips TV seems a bit egocentric and bossy. The amplifier is the centre of things, not the TV.

Energy drains away so it's a good plan to get to a transporter plate with some speed. We probably can now show the ship starting to break up.

Great dedication!

I believe I need the eARC one to send TV sound to the amp, unfortunately. I sometimes want to do that. I don't need any device to assume that any other device needs to be on or off, just send the sound along to the amp when it is on. That's all. My LG was close to doing that.

The shuttles were too big for sprites back in the day. Would have been nice to use them. I had the engines fire up to fry anything behind.

It`s nothing to do with me, just a rip-off of my ideas by people who ripped us off before.

Puzzled by people not wanting surprises in games. Every big boss ever is a surprise and the first meetings don`t go well. I remember the Rainbow Islands Big Spider. It got us fast every time for a week until we figured out how to nobble it and now it`s a doddle. Same then with the Big Helicopter.

Thanks and cheers!

It was going to be a Paradroid-style top-down attack inside the dreadnought by the pilots. Unfortunately there wasn`t enough space in RAM for all the graphics. I still wanted a break from flying, so we tried the reactor room. It needed something a bit more involved than the slot machine.

It`s not trivial to make sense of anyone`s disassembly, especially as complex as that. Especially as you would need to add meaningful labels to understand it.

You`re welcome! Amazing that the games are still going strong.

You`re welcome. I`m glad and impressed that the games live on.

Paradroid 90 had robots with an angle of vision, so you could sneak up behind them. Others had radar so you couldn`t sneak up. Since the Influence Device had its own abilities, that`s what was always used. I wouldn`t have X-Ray vision, but you can see the doors opening and closing in nearby rooms.

Nice one!

I don`t like to put too much info up on an action game because when it`s all hands to the pumps; you don`t have time to read displays. Just looking at your score is a distraction.

In fairness, I never thought of a timer display. The number of waves goes up on later levels too. It`s war, would you know how many are going to attack?
U2 added another complexity, the Victory symbols you touch speeds things up to "Land Now!", though I would have to find in the code to see how.

Uridium and U2 are slightly different. Uridium has a list of attack waves to run. It moves to the next one whenever the wave is all gone, plus a few seconds. When the list is done, it sounds the "Land Now!", so it`s not linear, depends on how long the waves last. Manta destruction steps back a bit.

We lived from game to game. Never expected to still be talking and writing about them 40 years later!

We had a 3-colour back almost-silhouette, just for some shape behind the main ship. 7 colours was not enough for the dreadnaughts. If we only used hardware sprites, we`d get 15 colours for them, but we had a contingency to plot into the background if there were more than 4 in a line.

We made the Mantas a different colour scheme, which locked in certain shared colours across all ships. We needed fire and explosions anyway. But yes, some more contrast would be needed. A redraw rather than a palette change. The backgrounds share 15 colours with the sprites and the "sprites".

Cheers! I am firmly of the belief that only I liked the 3D font! I changed the colours late on to help. I went to a lot of trouble to draw that font and I was darned well going to use it! I do appreciate the issues, it messes with the brain, especially over other graphics with 3 different D.

There are lessons to be learned from Uridium 2, the backgrounds were too busy and we lost the simplicity of the C64 with all the changing shapes of the platforms. I`d like to do something. My graphical skills likely aren`t up to it. Needs experimenting. We briefly had a dual-playfield version.

Bits and pieces of the time, I guess. I had seen some space-station type games and thought I could do better. There was Doctor Who`s Robots of Death story. Blake`s 7 was in there somewhere. I had also written a COBOL game back in 1982 called Survive which had 6 players on 10 connected levels.

Back at you. I liked what you did with Prometheum.
I think TRON helped me too. I just bought it on Ultra HD and finally it looks like it did in the cinema, not a DVD smudge. Cheers!

New TV is playing up. I switched it off and it shut off the amplifier. OK, then I switch the amp on to listen to an SACD and the amp shuts off after 5 mins. On again and 5 minutes later, off. And again. Unplugged the TV HDMI and we`re OK. It hasn`t shut off SACDs before. Now to find the CEC setting.

That was me on programming, design, and font graphics. I had a bunch of graphics artists, who variously would design features on their levels. Sound was by Jason Page, and Emma P. on vocals.