Childhood dreams of creating a game on the ZX-Spectrum

Hello, residents of the community.

This post wanted to write, after reading the post Computer game-building - paper and felt-tip pens .

The first computer, the Great ZX-Spectrum, came to me around 1992. Of course, at first I played it all day long, but then I got carried away with Basic and programming. I wrote all sorts of programs for myself and was happy until I saw a friend on his super i386 2mb game, or rather the GAME - WarCraft I and UFO. And so I wanted something like that bright, beautiful and exciting to be on my Old Man-Spectrum and year 96 at 96 I wanted to make a Game for myself - WarCrafter;)
')
Caution, small traffic!

He began to create sprites, select the size and size ratio of units and buildings. The castle turned out to be the largest - 7x8 acquaintances, in the middle of the picture is a mine, a ram of locks to the right of it, a little higher - viewing-protective towers, a house of peasants, a catapult, a ballista, on top is a farm :)

Pictures on the text are clickable



Then he proceeded to the animation - the stages of construction of buildings, marinas and other buildings. All construction had to be animated:



Then he painted the stages of building the castle, wondering about the size of buildings and mobile objects:



Explanation of the next picture. Combat units are either represented by pictograms, as in the case of a knight and a viking, or by a picture, in the case of a catapult. Then there are the tasks of the arrays of the game world, in which animals and buildings will be placed. I couldn’t have done AI, therefore the game meant a game of 2 people, where the color of the border would indicate the player who makes a move:



Then I started doing game management, scrolling cards, choosing units, managing units:



Taxes ... Further TTX units, technical points of movement of units, symbols in the data array of the world:



And finally, after all the preparatory stages, the code itself is actually in Basic. At that time, I was still interested in the smart thing. LaserBasic is the BASIC compiler, the compiled code worked much faster, but after loading the LaserBasic RAM, it was catastrophically low. Therefore, I had to give it up and write in the only language I could have at that time, the Great and Terrible BASIC.



Everything went fine, the code was written quickly and cheerfully (in those days I could sit back and sit for hours without redress), everything was fine, but ...

48 kilobytes of the Spectrum was not enough for such a “global”)) project on Basic, about 20-30% of the code and 90% of the pictures were made.
About 3 months were killed for everything.

UPD:
Good article about the Spectrum on Ferr , thanks to comrade Levsha100

Thanks to friend piroJOKE that reminded me of an interesting site with Spectrum games that you can play right on the site. For nostalgic.

UPD2:
myspeccy.com seems to be from habraeffekt, periodically informs me that he is Drupal and you all go to the forest.

UPD3:
I had a samopayny spectrum on the Leningrad board with a bios of 1990, according to the sign "-" double loading from the tape was maintained. By the sign "*" was available memory editor. I, on the advice of a friend, soldered a toggle switch to the processor's legs to call an unmasked NMI interrupt, it seems like an analogue to turn off the game, then “*” to drop in to look at the contents of the game in the hex editor. Rules like this money in SimCity.
I reread this book hundreds of times: