itch.io

Nice! Like Rally-X Championship Edition! I managed to get a score of 73,120. You make so many terrific games!

Well hold on a moment, I found some more broken items and programs, there'll be another update soon.

I'm still playing this. High score so far is 18,120.

This is great!

Although this version does have my extra notes and stuff. If you want that, I could just send them to you I suppose.

Honestly, I think it's going to be nearly impossible for me to fix Dungeon at this point. It's weird though, there's several Dungeon adventures on Loadstar issues. Obviously at the time people didn't have this trouble using it. It makes me wonder if the version on Loadstar Compleat isn't broken, it does use the problematic REL files.

The version on Loadstar Compleat is mostly the same as this anyway.

The version that's up now should have the fixed 1581 disks in it.

There's so many wonderful things in Loadstar's "pages."

 Thousands of programs, artworks, musical pieces and articles. A lot of them, it's true, fall under the category of things there are better equivalents of now, like there was a spreadsheet published on Issue 15 that's nice to have if all you have is a Commodore 64, but is sadly insufficient these days.

But the saving grace of Loadstar nowadays is the art, music, and
computer games! I have long maintained that games don't go obsolete, and even the clunky games written in BASIC have a real interest and worth to them, and I'm not just saying that because, if you hunt through its issues, you'll find a few I wrote myself.

gumpy over on loadstarce.com made fixed versions of the 1581 images. I'll be including them here once I'm sure they're okay, but they're available on the Internet Archive here.

Yay! I'll try it out!

A cool idea! I have a problem though in that pressing I sometimes causes the game to blank out, forcing me to reload.

It's a cruel twist of fate the Morton can jump higher than Marwin can survive falling.

I know someone who worked for Paws many years ago, who says this is awesome, and it's the kind of thing their artists would have loved to create back in the day.

But... where's Odie?

The bug that allows you to pass through monsers exists in arcade Pac-Man too, although there it mostly hits when the monsters aren't vulnerable.

I tried to post a screenshot, but I got an error saying "post: body: expected text between 1 and 20480 characters." The score in the screenshot was 52 points, lasting 32 seconds.

I had a game that went slightly longer, with a score of 57; I think the time was 37 seconds. I notice, when the game last that long, that the stars in the background scroll by in a repetitive manner, separating out into discrete lines.
This doesn't seem to me to be a very good score, but it seems like success is partly luck, in not getting a configuration of rocks that herds you inescapably into the corner.

I don't know if anyone's reading this, but I figured it's as good a place as any to mention it, a person ported a number of Videlectrix games to the awesome farflung futuretech of the Apple II: http://deater.net/weave/vmwprod/sb/

The Dungeon Maker has a couple of bugs. Most significantly, it doesn't work correctly in two-drive mode, which is how I've set up Dungeon for use for playing so you don't have to swap disks so much.

For storing items, Dungeon uses the Commodore-specific REL file format, which is difficult to simulate without also simulating a Commodore disk drive. If it weren't for that, I'd put the Dungeon files in a local directory in the distribution to play from there. It's weird how 34-year-old design decisions can affect emulation now.

There is at least one other significant Maker bug that I don't know what triggers it, that can once in a while cause the infuriating DISK ERROR when its time to save your work. I'm not sure if it also happened on normal hardware.

I'd love to find Jon Mattson too, he made several nice games for LOADSTAR, but we don't know what happened to most contributors. Jon Mattson, Ian Adams, Barbara Schulak, J.C. Hilty, and now, David Caruso II.

Ah, that co-author listed is Jon Mattson. I don't think he was a co-creator, he made two of the adventures LOADSTAR published for Dungeon. He was a prolific LOADSTAR contributor and made several other programs for it, including one game system of his own. But Dungeon predates his time with LOADSTAR, I think.

What information did you uncover? Is it online somewhere? It'd be nice to see, maybe I could dig something up? In particular I'm interested in the "IFC Systems" that presumably published this before LOADSTAR.

Aah! It would be great to hear about that!

AH! It's been a long time since I played Phantasie, and even then only for a short while, and the PC version on a compilation. I should look into that!

It is the same version as was on LOADSTAR, the disk image is the LOADSTAR image but with extraneous files removed. The source code to Dungeon is presumed lost along with whatever happen to its creator.

If you create something using Dungeon, you can mention and link to it here! Please show us what you make!

Why does this game want net access?

Trying to install then launch it gave this error:

"The following features required to run Godot projects on the Web are missing:
Cross Origin Isolation - Check web server configuration (send correct headers)"

Looking in the game's folder, it might have to do with the icon program being the most prominent executable? It's in the game's root. I don't know how itch.io's butler works but if it just latches on the most visible exe that might explain it.

Aaah, when I try to launch it from the Itch.io store app, I just get a message that icons were updated. Weird.

Refuses to install from the itch app, it gives an error saying "Cannot read property 'build' of undefined." Figured I'd let you know in case you can figure out what the problem is.

Thanks for looking into it. Mappy's a fiddly game sometimes because of things like this.

Correction to the above: when you get knocked into a cat, you don't die so much as you just pass through any cats, and if the animation finishes while you're overlapping a cat, _then_ you die.

One point of difference with the arcade game is, it was very lenient with the knockback from doors. If you open a door with the knob on your side, and it knocks you into a cat, in the arcade the cat would be knocked out and you keep going. In this remake, if this happens, you lose a life.

It makes the microwave doors much harder to use effectively. I just had a game where every time I died it was due to this!

This is a pretty fun game! One thing I find it really needs, though, is a full screen mode. During the action, it's very easy for the mouse cursor to leave the bounds of the window, causing your skeletons to get lost. Or even worse, when trying to dodge, clicking outside of the window and causing the game to lose focus! It's also kind of hard to see in such a small window?

Might I suggest using Question Mark for the help function? It's somewhat standard among classic roguelikes.

Hello! I have bug reports... some of these may not be bugs, but I figure I should report them just in case, all of them seem like a thing that may be awry.

* Shift-H conflicts between quick play move left and Help

* Game's ID game and food clock seems really easy: you begin with several extra scrolls of identify and a lot of extra food. I was tempted to leave a Ring of Regeneration on generally?

* You can move diagonally in corridors, and even through doors. This may be a design decision, but Rogue itself doesn't allow that.

* Maps have no loops, there's only ever one way to get anywhere.

* You can see parts of wall intersection tiles that shouldn't be visible.

* On normal levels, once seen, you can always see a tile's contents, even if you move far away from it. It makes the potion of Detect Monsters less useful (although it's never been really useful, even in Rogue).

* On dark levels, the reverse happens, which is even worse: you instantly forget the existence of walls when they leave your sight, making it difficult to get around.

* Quick play doesn't cut corners in corridors.

* Leprechauns don't teleport away when they steal money, Bats don't move randomly. These could just be design decisions though, they seem very obvious.

* Wands of Slow Monster don't have the expected effect? I'm not sure what they even do.

* There might be some confusion with ring hands when removing rings? Sometimes when I took a ring off, the wrong ring was taken off.

Sometimes the Zap command assumes the item you want to use? Not always though, it seems uncertain as to the circumstances. Maybe it's a keyboard interface issue.

* Monsters know where you are even if you're not in sight of them, and can pathfind directly to you. Rogue sometimes had monsters that magically just knew where you are too, though.

* Specifying an object on letter P at a prompt can result in inadvertent prayers. (For me, it happened after quaffing a potion on P.)

* Monsters seem to get a turn before magic effects aimed at them occur. This is what ended my first game, I was next to a Medusa, tried to teleport it, but the game gave it a parting shot.

* Cancellation doesn't seem to work on Medusa or Phantom? This is also connected with that game-ending occurrence. I zapped a Medusa, but she was still able to confuse me; it's possible that a nearby Phantom was in the way, but if it was it should have become visible?

Still, all in all, a good implementation generally! I'm sure bugs will get squashed over time. Thanks for making this!

This is so nice!

I can understand that. It feels like the whole world is full of things, and so few of them are interesting, and the only way to tell what they are is to look at each of them individually.

It's something we're trying to combat at Set Side B, but we only have a limited amount of time and energy too. Sigh.

I can understand that very well. Except for a couple of brief moments, all of my work in trying to make or write about games has been met with a big MEH from the world in general. (Of course, truthfully, I don't think I'm very good at the making part.)

Also, discoverabillity sucks everywhere.