Hi guys, thanks for reviewing my indie ECHOES OF ATLANTIS adventure game. I get your points, and overall thank you for the support. More games to come.
Two things. The reason I have the graphics as a full screen, but only with the tiny location window for each area , is first of course because it helps to save memory but also because if I would only draw the tiny location window, that would not increase the area available for the text anyway. With GAC is always the same area, no matter you draw a lot on the location screen or you don´t. So as it does not take much memory to merge a central main illustration for each location, I do that and only draw the location area at the center.
If you guys play my ECLIPSIA or Shangri-La adventures you´ll notice I use graphics in another more colorful way, but in Echoes of Atlantis due to the "invisible" complexity for each adventure, I hardly had memory left for the basic location illustrations at the end.
I may be trying Pawn or other engines in the future, but the main reason I´m not in a hurry is because despite everything else, writing my games in GAC is a nostalgia thing for me as it takes me back to 1990 when I was doing that just for fun, never expecting someone to ever look at my games. So GAC for me is like a time machine, my Zen thing. Also as I mentioned , it´s the perfect tool to sketch the structure of an adventure that later i can take and write another book, create a comic, etc. I have some sort of an idea for a book for Echoes of Atlantis...like I did with the House that Wept or with A Terrific Weekend adventure, but I think maybe with Echoes I may create either an illustrated storybook or some sort of a graphic novel. I don´t know yet. But I didn´t write the game just thinking it would be only a ZX Game. My thing is telling stories, so everything starts like that for me.
Echoes initially was going to be just a game called Alexandria. No more. But then when I was writing the story and the game at the same time, my imagination kept opening doors that needed more expanded settings. By the time I wrote the second part, I knew I was doomed. But I never expected to write a 6 part game which took me a year to complete. And actually, I had to stop myself becaus the game was going to have a part 7. Which I still plan to write as an Epilogue for the main six part adventure. It will be a standalone adventure, hopefully with one part only, but it will be a closing of some bits I left open at the end even though players didn´t noticed them.
Anyway, once again thanks for noticing my game.
And I´m not just saying that because of it, but this magazine of yours is really special. Best speccy content I´ve came across on a ZX magazine.