Octavius Kitten (The Game!)

This game is a platformer for the 128K ZX Spectrum, based on the YouTube personality 'Octav1us' (the artist formerly known as Octav1us Kitten!). It's currently in development and should be finished and available for download some time in May 2019.

Octav1us on Youtube

Octav1us on Twitter

It will be completely free and I'm not accepting donations - you'll be able to download the .SNA file from this page and run it in your favourite ZX Spectrum emulator.  There are a few around, I used 'ZX Spin' as it has an integrated assembler and debugger with which I developed this game.

Some boring technical details...

This game is being coded entirely in Z80 assembly language, which I learned way back in 1984. Back then I did what many others did - translated assembler by hand into opcodes, and drew graphics out on graph paper, translating pixels into hexadecimal in my head. 35 years is a long time to have a language knocking around in your head with no use for it, so I did what any games programmer would do and made a game.

These days many ZX Spectrum games are created using 'Arcade Games Designer' by Jonathan Cauldwell - a totally brilliant tool, and if you'd like to create a game for the Speccy I thoroughly recommend AGD. But I've been a programmer for most of my life, and it's the programming that interests me;  so I decided to code this all in Z80, as I did back in the 80's.  Here's a little chunk of the Z80 code from the game:

I also created an editor for the game, written in C#.NET using Windows Forms. You can create sprites, tiles, rooms, import audio modules, and add logical devices such as switches and elevators.  I set this up so that you can export to a .SNA file at the click of a button, which can then be loaded straight into the emulator. This created a nice quick turnaround in development that made the time invested well worth it. The file that will be available for download shortly will have been exported by this editor, without having been in the RAM of a Spectrum!

The song tracks in the game were arranged by Richard Bennett in Vortex Tracker 2. The main theme was reproduced from Octav1us's channel, and the other tracks are original compositions by Richard B.  I wrote the audio code myself rather than use VT2's code, as I needed it to run super-quick, and also be able to do a few custom things.

Coming soon (hopefully in May 2019)...