King for a Day - My Blog

2008-08-19T20:45:00.007+02:00

This pixel art is an appropriate contribution for the Bejing 2008 spirit, don't you think? (ok, ok... but hey, at least, he looks asian)

I can't remember what I made this one for, but I think it was probably one of the many trials that didn't make it into Traps'n'Treasures. You know, in the old days, you just started with a pixel and then something came out. If you were unlucky enough, it looked so cool that the whole game concept had to be changed to fit to that one image (and this is not really wise if you have to fullfil a contract on time).

Longplay Video of Traps'n'Treasures (2h:40m)

2008-06-18T12:24:00.003+02:00

There is a unbelievable video of Traps'n'Treasures on YouTube showing a player called LEMM playing through all the levels in one go! It took him 2 hours and 40 minutes only!

I'm really impressed and didn't know that such a thing is even possible (Must make it even harder next time). ;-)

BTW: Thanks to the Anonymous user to point this one out in the last post's comment.

2007-07-18T12:59:00.000+02:00

I just discovered that YouTube-video with the title "100 Amiga games in 10 minutes" and feel honoured that Traps'n'Treasures is one of the 100 games presented (Love the "old school" background music). Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUoJBerFDsA&v3 .

Thanks to laffer35 for his contribution.

Essential Game Development Tools

2006-10-22T16:55:00.000+02:00

Talking about essential tools for game development I have to mention LevelEd. This one was used to create the Levels for Traps'n'Treasures on the Amiga. It allowed to create big level maps with only 255 32x32 Pixel character blocks. I always try to find the time to develop my own tools so I can expand the functionality along development.

René Straub got married!

2006-09-30T00:00:00.000+02:00

The developer of Leonardo, Crack, Rolling Ronny and more fine Amiga games finally got married. Here is the link to the wedding page of the happy couple.

I wish them all the best!

My Amiga Music Legacy on AMP!

2006-07-26T22:36:00.000+02:00

I'm very happy to announce that my original SoundFX Songs from 1987-1992 finally made it to the AMIGA Music Preservation Site.

With the link below you can directly access my profile and download the songs I composed:
http://amp.dascene.net/detail.php?detail=modules&view=6317

Note: You need the Deliplayer if you want to play them on a PC.

Redbeards Revenge - Traps'n'Treasures Secret #2

2006-07-05T22:51:00.000+02:00

Ahoi There!
If you believe it or not but the evil pirate Redbeard - that was playing the counterpart of Jeremy Flinn - actually existed. Here, and for the first time ever, the fans of Traps'n'Treasures can finally see who they had to fight against in these hours and hours of tough gameplay.

There were actually plans that we put end-bosses in TNT but there were other priorities that were more important (e.g. "Why is this damn memory management losing the released bytes!!!" ). Another reason why we decided against end-bosses was that in a Jump'n'Run end-bosses were always associated with "Jump with own bottom on enemie's head". We did not want to go the same way.

About Scooter!

2005-11-22T20:19:00.000+01:00

As already mentioned, the little girl called "Scooter" was the predecessor of Jeremy Flynn (who later had his apperance in the commercial title Traps'n'Treasures). Scooter was going to be a cute Jump'n'Run Heroine but because I went to study english abroad the whole project was put on ice. Well, here at least some screenshots of a demoversion that already used some of the logic that was later used in TNT.

Trick or Treat!

2005-10-31T10:00:00.000+01:00

For all the ghosties out there I have a couple of themes that make you feel in the right place today...

http://www.kingroman.com/tunes/DancingWitches.mp3
http://www.kingroman.com/tunes/GatheringOfTheGhools.mp3
http://www.kingroman.com/tunes/MistOnTheSerpentsPath.mp3

Bob Wizard

2005-10-17T22:37:00.000+02:00

Today I present you a screenshot of my first semi-professional program written in 68'000 Assembler. It was called Bob Wizard and it was meant to be an editor for designing Blitter Objects that later could be used in games:

Unfortunately I was so focused on the design of it that instead of making a logical size of the pixel area like 32x32 or 48x48 I used 40x40 which was complete nonsense. That's probably the reason why it was not even a desired object on copy parties. However - I worked out a cool fill routine which was my pride and joy.

Pixel Art #2

2005-10-17T21:54:00.000+02:00

Et voilà! Here he is - errrr - before the conversion. Yes - this little girl was the first draft of the hero (or better heroine) for Traps'n'Treasures or at least the beginning of it. Actually at the time the game was called "Scooter" which was nothing more than a working title. Over the years the plot and the character changed into something more adventurous as you know.

Here is the complete metamorphoses:

Pixel Art #1

2005-10-12T21:26:00.000+02:00

Okay. Here's a little eye-catcher for a change. This little hero here is called Flynn - Jeremy Flynn.

He's the main character from Traps'n'Treasures, the game I designed with Ruedi Hugentobler (Level Design, Music) and Orlando (Graphics) in 1992. Orlando, responsible for most of the graphics, did a great job especially on the wonderful title screen, but more about that project later.

However - It took Orlando and me several weeks or even months until the final shape of Jeremy was formed the way he appeared in the game.

Next time you'll find out what Jeremy looked like before his workout sessions... You'll see and be flabbergasted :-)

Cover Versions

2005-10-12T12:38:00.000+02:00

Not like today but around the 80's it was quite a challenge to bring real music onto a computer like the Amiga. The SCA (Swiss cracking Association) group successfully demonstrated a digitized version of the Miami Vice score spread on several swap disks.

An alternative way (and sizewise more moderate) was to sample only some core instruments or beats of the original song and rewrite the song with the help of a soundtracker. Here are some results of that approach:

http://www.kingroman.com/tunes/ForeverTonight.mp3
http://www.kingroman.com/tunes/Zoolook.mp3
http://www.kingroman.com/tunes/Bad.mp3

Eliminator

2005-10-11T22:21:00.000+02:00

When Hewson's Atari ST version of Eliminator was converted to Amiga, Linel needed a title song for it. Just one day before mastering I was asked to provide the missing element. Unfortunately I said yes, worked the whole night through and delivered a rather disappointing piece of music. Nevertheless it made it onto the disk:

http://www.kingroman.com/tunes/Eliminator.mp3

This is what the title screen looked like by the way:

Leonardo 2 - In the Circus

2005-10-11T21:50:00.000+02:00

Unfortunately this game never made it into the shelves. Orlando started designing some great artwork, characters and even a titlescreen for this game but somehow the project got buried after some time.

Inspired by Orlando's graphics I provided two songs for the circus theme. On the titlescreen you could see Leonardo on a unicycle doing some magic tricks out of a hat (As far as I remember):

http://www.kingroman.com/tunes/Leo2Unicycle.mp3
http://www.kingroman.com/tunes/Leo2InsideTheCircus.mp3

Leonardo

2005-10-10T10:21:00.000+02:00

Leonardo was the first official project I participated on and off course was very flattered when I was asked to provide the in-game-sound for a commercial game. It's kind of a mind-puzzle game and I think it was for everybody of the team the first step into commercial game programming with all its pluses and minuses. The game was not incredibly successful but everybody was very proud to see the reviews in the computer mags.

http://www.kingroman.com/tunes/LeonardoIntro.mp3
http://www.kingroman.com/tunes/LeonardoSong.mp3

To make yourself a picture of the look:

Note: If you once play the game then listen carefully to the sound effect that the squelching rock makes - It's a bag with cornflakes being crunched in my right hand :-)

Clown-O-Mania

2005-10-09T23:23:00.000+02:00

The following SoundFx Mod I wrote for a game called Clown-o-Mania by Roman Bosshart. I think especially the first song conveys the right kind of jolly-factor to the gamer.

http://www.kingroman.com/tunes/Clown-O-Mania.mp3

The graphics wizard Orlando (Roland Petermann) designed the picture for the title screen which is one of my favourites from his portfolio (Just after Traps'n'Treasures):

Ever heard of LINEL's SoundFX?

2005-10-09T22:39:00.000+02:00

Hi

In the next days I will upload some of my old Amiga tunes of which many of them never made it into a game. However most of them are unfinished or short harmony trials. Also the variety of samples used in my songs is a bit limited because at these days good quality samples were not that wide spread. I had my set of instruments that I preferred - and reused them a lot. :-)

Nevertheless - Just listen and feel the good old 4-Channel-Sound-Memories return.

All songs were composed with SoundFX, a great soundtracker made by Christian Haller for Linel.

To convert them to MP3 I first used DeliPlayer (The only mod player I know that manages to play SoundFX Mods on the PC) with its great recording feature to save the output as wave file and then encoded it into MP3. The free version of DeliPlayer only supports Mono output but it's actually quite pleasant to listen to the songs that way.