Lancess Priya plus/4

I found some time to convert the Lancess Priya game to Commodore plus/4, the underappreciated little brother of Commodore 64. I formally demo'd the plus/4 version at the Skrolli magazine demoparty at 23th September 2023, and the game is now available at plus4world.

Lancess C64 made extensive use of sprites to generate the dashboard and fireball graphics, so all this had to be made to work in the pseudo-pixel character graphics.

But this was not a great problem, some of the font elements could even look nicer when they are more chunky. I already experimented with it on the C64 version before deciding on the sprite approach. This also simplified the interrupt a little, as there's no need to multiplex sprites.

The fireballs (enemy shots) were the toughest, as these needed to be drawn differently. I believe the added speed of the plus/4 made it possible to draw them without noticeable slowdown. The graphics also use less space than the sprites, which although not necessary, made handling memory issues easier.

The fireballs, taken together with the sights also means the gameplay area is quite monochromatic. The sights cannot be moved in every frame like in the C64 version, but I felt this wasn't a problem. I added some color to the texts, to take at least some advantage of the platform qualities.

TED sound is much simpler than SID, so it didn't take long to have some sound fx and some abysmal ditties playing here and there. I didn't set the bar very high though! I ignored the SIDCart route this time as the C64 version soundscape was quite simple to begin with.

I took the opportunity to fix a few glitches and bugs found from the C64 version, these may be eventually released as a C64 v. 1.1.

-You could ambiguously "fly over" the towers, which wasn't very apparent if you fly closer to the ground. It made it look you could just pass through everything, but this was not the intention. The towers are clamped a little awkwardly to the bottom of the screen to prevent them from disappearing.

-The "deathstar" graphic in the space battle would wrap around in a rather silly way. I just couldn't be bothered for the initial release. I now made the wrap-around at least a little less conspicuous for this non-moon.

Lancess Priya at plus4world