Yes, I actually finished the game in 2018, and just had it laying around ever since. I was in talks with several publishers about doing physical releases, but none of them panned out.
My guess was that during the whole retro resurgence, some of the small retro publishers just had so much going on, that they tried to bite over more than they could chew, as some of them just suddenly didn't reply, even though they reached out themselves and expressed interest into publishing the game.
I did a small physical production myself, using bootleg Pokemon cartridges from Aliexpress actually, but never an official digital release. So that is why is released it now on itch.io. I still think it is a quite solid and well polished title, so I was a little sad that I never did an official release of it.
Hi Steven, thanks for the comment, and for playing the game. I am always very humbled that someone took the time to actually download and play it.
Regarding spawning of missing colours: as i remember it, i actually weighted the distribution of which ones spawn, to favour the ones that are needed. I can hear from your experience that i have to look into that again though. Thanks for sharing. Makes we want to do more DOS games :)
hi, thank you for the kind words, and thanks for playing my game :) it is possible to end up in a situation where there are no more possible moves. That is, when there are no tiles you can move to get a match. In that case, you also become game over. It is quite rare though.
You know, the Asphyxias Tutorials was what really got me started on VGA programming back in the days. Those were my bibles! I studied all of them so much as a teen, and was what got me into demo coding. One day as a teen i actually tried calling his phone number, which was in one of the tutorials, but when he finally picked up the phone i was just too shy to say anything, and just hung up! :) I have the physical Abrash book btw! not cheap and easy to get by these days i can tell you! It was just so much cooler having the physical book i could look in, while i developed the game. That made it so much more authentic, instead of sitting with a laptop and a PDF besides my 486.
Good question actually.. I was toying with the idea of doing another DOS game, now that i refined my graphics routines and build up a small library, but i am maybe leaning a bit more toward doing something on a modern platform instead. My last 3 projects has been on Gameboy Advance, Playstation 1, and now DOS / EGA, and none of them has really gotten any attention, and was all 1-2 years of work each. So it would be nice to do something that a bit wider audience could maybe enjoy next time, even though i prefer coding for all the old platforms instead.
That was my exact experience as well during development. I had the original EGA documentation from IBM as a really badly scanned PDF and the book "Programmers guide to the EGA, VGA and SVGA graphics cards", but that was it.
All of them were also not very good at describing anything related to best practices etc, but more or less only listed all the registers and memory addresses. So I had to do so much experimentation and learn stuff myself the hard way while I was developing.
Now that I build up a small library of all my EGA routines and know a lot more about how I could do things better and faster, i'm almost tempted to do another game based on all that.
I was also considering actually writing some tutorials/articles about it, so other people might be able to follow in my footsteps as well.
Sadly not many people have EGA monitors anymore. Even the hardcore retro computer nerds who have real CRT monitors don't have an EGA one, only VGA, which makes kinda stupid to limit yourself to an inferrior standard if you can just use mode 13 instead :) only if you are like me, and see it as both fun, challenging and a nostalgic factor.
Hi! Thank you so much both for trying the game and taking the time to post this. That bug have been annoying me for a while, and it appeared after a tried to optimize the game a bit more, so I didn't redrew and erased more on the screen than absolutely necessary. I was just so close to finishing the game, and just didn't have more energy to fix that bug in the final hour. I will probably look at it once I recharge a bit of energy :) thanks!
