Amazon Tales

The New Dimension

Status: Full Game, Findability: 5/5

Amazon Tales was to be something a little different from two game creators – Richard Bayliss and Alf Yngve. Richard was firstly doing a side ways scrolling game with a running man as a main character. Alf on the other hand was branching away from SEUCK on the C64 for the first time.

The 16kb cartridge competition ran by RGCD was coming up, and Richard decided to write a new game based on Jungle Story (and building on the Bionic Granny Returns game). As time went on, the idea blossomed into a completely different type of game where you play the vet from a tribe who accidentally has released an elephant from its pen into the jungle. You have to go and find it and bring it back to safety.

The game was a sideways scrolling game, and Alf produced all the graphics in SEUCK – which Richard later ported over to Charpad and into a completely new engine coded by Richard. The graphics produced were fantastic as usual by Alf.

However, sadly the game still very much felt like a SEUCK game that had been enhanced due to not quite getting to the stage of completion as planned, and as a result the game didn’t score greatly at the competition. It had some problems unfortunately with a few compilation problems, but Richard just about managed to get it submitted in time.

After the competition and at a 75% complete state – Richard was due to go back to the game and add features such as falling boulders, monkeys dropping coconuts and adding in collectible objects. Free time was limited though, and mixed in with a dipping motivation or enthusiasm for the game, Richard decided to call it a day on the game.

Richard has kindly passed on all the remaining resources on the game for us to add. It is pretty much a final version and completable, but we have still listed it as a preview, as there was certainly more to come for the game over time.

Then for Christmas 2019, Richard decided to actually finish off the game once and for all – so we’re pleased to add it here and also close the case. Creator Speaks has been updated to include details from Richard about his work!

Case closed!

Contributions: Richard Bayliss

Supporting content

Creator speaks

Richard speaks about work on Amazon Tales:

“This game was originally made back in 2012 for RGCD’s 16KB Game cartridge competition back in time. However, due to the lack of time I had producing the game (Due to circumstances that were beyond my control). The game ended up 75% complete, and it had a lot of missing elements, which I could not put into the game. After a small bug in the packing one day before the deadline for the compo, the game almost didn’t get submitted in time. The result of the compo game ended up to be too easy to play. Amazon Tales reached 11th place in the competition. That game was pretty much complete at the time. I also threw the game into the GTW archive, due to loss of interest and various problems programming the full game.

Moving forward 7 years, and having more free time available. I was browsing through my PC to back up and restore some of my previous C64Studio projects. I discovered Amazon Tales was fully backed up on an old and working CD ROM. So in October 2019 – December 2019. I spoken to Alf (well emailed him really) about returning to the project and suggested that it would be great for a TND Christmas 2019 release. Since last year I released nothing.

Alf and I got together and worked on finally getting this game finished. Alf did more of the game graphics and improvements. I did more programming, and tried to vary game play, as part of an experiment. This was done as part of a future plan for my 2020 game, Cruiser-X 79. I worked on programming the main game, new front end with his score table. Then along with some friends, tested and debugged this game, for example NTSC scrolling, fixing sprite flicker bugs, and making a smoother scroll. The testing team helped me fix numerous bugs. I reworked the music, making it sound more Matt Gray(ish) and added sound effects. After full testing of the game was complete, the game finally got finished and to end it all, I added Trevor Storey’s loading picture. The result turned out great. I am very pleased with what Alf and I finally achieved in bringing out what was originally a game that wasn’t into a final full free commercial looking game title. I hope you like the final production, as much as Alf and I enjoyed making the game (Except for the bug finding part, which really drove me crazy) :)”

Update history

26/12/19 – Richard finishes game and releases. Case closed!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 1 Comment

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