CyberApe (1996)

Bastard-hard platform game with few colours but great music

Published by Richard GoodwinFiled under Projects

Where the other two games required me to work with existing elements, CyberApe was a completely original game coded by Mark Johnson with music by Leaf Garland.  I created all the graphics and level design.

The main problem with designing this game was the extremely limited memory available for assets, which meant that animations might have only six frames instead of 8 or more you'd expect, and the graphics had to be in a 16 colour palette... But with at least two of those 16 used up by a mask, and a background effect ("copperlist" colour fades).  The backgrounds could, if I remember correctly, produce 4096 colours, which meant some great sunrise and sunset effects.  A review (which criticised the lack of colours but didn't seem to realise that the game wasn't running in 256 colour mode) mentioned that the backgrounds were great... and completely unreproducable in the screenshots taken for the review.

Top:  CyberApe loading screen
Bottom:  Test images

We had high hopes of at least making a bit of money, but I think I made a tenner from months of work.  Leaf's music in particular was damned good, but he never did get to buy that new computer.  In fact, where are those .mod files..? [[uploads]]