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Monday, March 28, 2016

Why an Apple II game?

It was either this or hack Castle Wolfenstein and turn it into Castle Bovenstein, with cows playing the Nazis and the SS mooing when entering the room…

We decided that was entirely too silly. At least for now. Seriously though, our respects to Silas Warner; he created one of the truly great games of all time.

Now, about this project.

Nox Archaist is in some ways 20+ years in the making. The idea has been in various states of progress since I first completed Ultima III on our Apple II+ in the mid 1980s. After an in depth exploration into the many ways to fail at creating a tile map with a guy moving on it in Applesoft BASIC back in the early 1990s, plans for creating this game spent plenty of time on the back burner.

We feel that there is something inherently special about the classic RPG style which has been lost in modern games. While we enjoy playing modern games, it is a different experience.


After recently playing through some of the best classic Apple II RPGs we were still looking for more of this style of game. Since new game development on this platform is mostly non-existent we decided to lay off the Liebfraumilch for a while, dust off the plans for Operation Archaist that originated way back when, and make the damn thing ourselves.



We will soon post the full story of how the project got started, the challenges along the way, and a few classic blunders. Fortunately none as serious as getting involved in a land war in Asia or going in against a Sicilian when death is on the line. Those were avoided at all costs.


Update: click here for a blog post with more details on how the project got started. 


4 comments:

  1. So where is the posts about how the project was started ?

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    1. Thanks for the reminder! We got distracted writing the game code and I see we didn't come back to this topic. We'll post something soon, probably in the next few weeks. If you'd like an email alert when new blog posts are made, you can sign-up for via the notifications tool on the right side of the blog screen.

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    2. Here is a link to the post with more details on how the Nox Archaist project was started:

      http://www.6502workshop.com/2016/12/origins-of-nox-archaist.html

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