New games for the Acorn Electron

> Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there.

This project follows on from my ruminations on the subject of retro and fantasy gaming devices, lots of which you can read over on the IDEAL-5 page.

IDEAL-5

With emulation, we can play any game from pretty much any platform on modern devices. With tools like Turbo Rascal Syntax Error, our modern tools allow us to work on these platforms much more easily than the developers of the 80s ever could.

Turbo Rascal Syntax error, “;” expected but “BEGIN”

So why would a developer pick one platform over another? Pure nostalgia?

I think there's an opportunity now to really concentrate on each platform's strengths. The Commodore 64 had the legendary SID chip and the most game-friendly graphics system around. It's not really surprising that there's still a (small) commercial market for new C64 releases.

Psytronik's online store sells mainly C64 titles, though there are a few Speccy ones too.

What did the Acorn Electron have? Not 16 different colours, in fact you couldn't really use more than 4 if you also wanted memory for your code or processor cycles for your game logic. Not fancy sound either, it's just got 1 channel of beeps and bloops. Not much better than the Spectrum.

What it did have was the best keyboard of its era: a proper mechanical one. Better even than the one on the more expensive BBC Micro. And for games, that was what you used, because the unexpanded Electron didn't have a joystick port.

Roguelikes

Very few roguelike games ever came out for Acorn computers. Rogue and its descendants come from an 80's of Unix and academia that had nothing in common with the UK's bedroom micro scene. There was The Valley (1982), which I remember mainly because I habirually played as "N the Dolt" having not really understood the character selection screen.

RPGs on the BBC Micro Game Archive

The Rogue Basin is the Roguelike wiki.

Yet with the benefit of hindsight, roguelikes are an ideal format for our little machine. Since it's turn-based, we don't have as severe CPU constraints as for a game that runs at 50fps. And there are often a lot of actions the player can take on their turn, which are traditionally assigned to pretty much every key and modifier combo available.

Broughlikes

Roguelikes are often highly complex and have all sorts of interesting lore and characters to meet. I am impatient to get something playable out there and see whether people like it. What to do?

Well, you could shrink the game down. Explore the space between Rogue, Sokoban, and chess. This is an area Michael Brough has been successfully mining for a few years, to the extent that he now gets his name on the whole genre, which probably annoys him a little.

Michael Brough

TODO: er, actually write one?