But it gets even better: In 1995, two years before I wrote the Deadland engine, I was attempting my hand at an U6 style tile engine. That project was lost a long time ago, due to combined hard disk and floppy-disk failures. There was even a whole design doc for this one, complete with a worked out story and all. It was a really big setback to my game programming ambitions when I lost all of that. Still, it’s cool to have at least some screen shots – I had thought that none survived.

Attentive readers (Hi, Pedro) will probably notice that some of the tiles look a lot like the one in U6, and indeed that did serve as the basis for many of them. But already you can see in these screens that I was working on replacing them (the walls, for example).

Deadland was inspired by two games in particular: Wasteland and UFO (sold in the United States under the “XCom” brand). It was written in turbo pascal with large sections (ie. the graphics routines) written in assembler. It didn’t run too well, the stand-alone graphics demo these screenshots were taken from, ran at about 9 fps. There was also a stand-alone character generator, of which unfortunately no screenshots remain.

The map consists of, if I remember correctly, two layers; the floor and the walls are seperate, allowing for more combinations and less graphics work. The darkness effect is achieved by having the same color palette in several levels of brightness in the global VGA palette, and shifting a pixel down before painting it. Easy optimization here is to pre-calculate tiles in different color levels, but that would have eaten a lot of RAM. And, yes, I did draw those graphics myself – pixeling them in fine detail in Deluxe Paint II enhanced.

Deadland was the successor of my first tileset engine, for the Dragongate project, which was more of a top-down implementation and had a much smaller field of view.

I think I lost the complete source code to this game in one of my hard-drive crashes. This is alright, because now the code would have historic value at best. Still, it’s too bad I never completed this game.

Needless to say, I am still kinda proud of what I did back then

_Update, 2007-07-13:_ I have found a few additional screenshots.

Now I have all rulesbooks, supplements, sourcebooks and adventures of TORG. Hooray. I’ll still have to track down some of the novels, however.

I actually read a book.

Yes, I know, it’s sad, but I haven’t read a book since my stay in the Novotel Kelsterbach. I know it’s sad, but I guess I have been so busy with all this other stuff that I didn’t really have the time for books.

Anyway, this changed on Saturday when some stuff arrived that I bought on eBay Germany. One of the books I got was “Storm Knights”, the first novel of the TORG trilogy. Since I had nothing to do on Saturday – I was supposed to go on a date but she asked me to meet on Sunday instead – I got lost in that novel and read from start to finish in one long session. Only 320 pages, so it’s not really an achievement.

“Storm Knights” itself is a fair book. The writing is okay, the story is okay, it’s not one of the best I read, but it’s not really horrible either. The main attraction is that the trilogy served as the introduction to the TORG game that was published by West End Games. If you know me, then you know that I absolutely love TORG. And “Storm Knights” does give some background and descriptions that really should have been in the TORG basic set.

So if you are a TORG fan like me, pick it up. Otherwise, don’t bother.