itch.io

Hi,

Thanks for that very positive response! You've done something pretty remarkable with all this language work, and I know you can't support all languages out there (62 is an incredible first start…) – but, as you acknowledge, Latin is a particularly important one. I'm glad to hear that it now has top priority!

One other suggestion is that you might include some instructions about how to play the basic game! Your docs are all about the language aspects – which is obviously what makes this release particularly interesting, but it's not immediately obvious what the objective of the game actually is, if you come to it without having seen it before! Some simple instructions would probably be helpful.

As for the various Star Trek languages… I don't think you can really be sure that the Klingons, Vulcans and Romulans never had Spectrum games. After all, Star Trek is set far in our future, when computers primarily talk to you rather than having simple bitmapped displays, but rumour has it that the operating systems of the computers installed on even the earliest Federation starships came bundled with at least one Spectrum emulator – and Memory Alpha has a complete archive of all known 8-bit software ever written, for all systems. Both the Romulans and the Klingons plundered that archive through espionage in its earliest days, whilst the Vulcans had legitimate access, and it's fair to assume that word of the Spectrum spread rapidly across the entire Alpha Quadrant as the other races rearched the origins of humanity's technology. Quite what they thought about our early computers isn't known; but how could they not be impressed?

In fact, if you watch the early part of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, when the Enterprise bridge is in chaos and the computers have crashed, you can clearly hear Spectrum loading sounds. It's clear proof that an errant ensign was trying to sneak a quick game of Jet-Set Willy just before the crisis began.