The Story of Westfront to Apse
Paul Allen Panks
Nostalgia is said to bring out the best in people. Even after years
have passed, I still long for the original disks to my very first game.
The game itself was a mere 52kb in length, but the scope of the project
spanned 8 months of my life. Countless hours were spent at the computer,
perfecting what was inherently an imperfect game. Setting aside school,
friends and even family, I labored in front of my old Commodore 128 to
create what is now considered my very first full-length game: Westfront.
To learn more about this game, including screenshots, scroll down to
the end of this document. The full-length title of the game was a tad
obscure: Enchanter: West Front to Apse. But the main ideas behind
the game were not.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
Considering that I had played just about every text adventure known to
man, it was a modest effort. The game itself spanned 208 blocks on disk,
which roughly translated into 52 kilobytes total. That isn't a very
large game (at least by today's standards), but for the BASIC 7.0 in
native Commodore 128 Mode, it was a whopper of a program! The game had
origins on the C64, and was quickly remodeled for 128 mode after variable
space ran low.
The game itself was approximately 206-210 blocks long, had some 70
rooms, 85 nouns, 32 or so verbs, and was WINDOWed in that the sprite graphic
that you see in the link above was displayed above the actual room
description. At the bottom were displayed highlighted Function Key commands,
accessible by pressing the appropriate function key.
I also used a sprite for the Long Range Mapping feature of the game,
which displayed a blue-ish, 3-dimensional lined landscape with a flashing
white dot that displayed the player location. The Short Range Mapping
feature, depending on the room entered, would display the tavern interior,
the shop interior and the church interior in multi-color,
SHIFTed and COMMODOREed Keyboard-style Graphics.
GAMEPLAY
Much of the game revolved around exploring sections of Norway,
including Oslo, Trondheim, Stavanger, Bergen and the Flora island. There
was also a Smurf village in the game, and part of the game involved
rescuing Smurfette and drugging Asriel (from one of Papa Smurf's potions)
and bringing his fur back to Handy smurf (for some equipment and armor
items). Hey, this wasn't a kid's game!
Also, if memory serves me, the player was supposed to visit some
fellow named Gomar in a treehouse, read from one of his books, and have
him explain worldly mysteries to the player helpful in finishing the game.
Finally, the player took a boat to the Lighthouse on Flora Island and
found several weapons, armor and possibly a backpack. There, they'd take
the boat back to Bergen (I think), locate an open plain under a "deep blue
sky", read from a scroll (either that, or incant a magical ring) and
Mordimar the Evil Magician would appear. Looks like someone played the
NES game "The Immortal", huh? :)
Anyway, the player would win by defeating Mordimar and saving Smurf
Village.
A LOOK BACK...AND FORWARD
There are many stories behind the development of this game. First,
there were the countless hours spent reading TSR Hobbies "Advanced Dungeons
& Dragons Beginner Module 1", and the companion "Player's Handbook". Without
these two books, Westfront would probably never have existed. I also
attribute Westfront's existance to playing Magnetic Scrolls "The Pawn"
during the Commodore's heyday. That game served as the basis for the
layout and structure of my humble text adventure.
Next, there were the self-beta testing sessions, mostly spent in
frustration with squashing bug after bug after bug! This would consist of
pressing the RUN/STOP and RESTORE keys repeatedly throughout a programming
sessions. Eventually the keys worn down and I had to get my Commodore 128
repaired. Ugh!
Finally, I remember the humorous look on my cousin's face when he
played the game for the first time:
Ryan: "Why can't I examine anything?"
Paul: "Oh, you just examine _objects_ in the game..."
Ryan: "Oh, ok...hey, what's the wine for?"
Paul: "You drink it..."
Ryan: (drinks wine)..."Ok...I'm now in Smurf Village. How the hell did
_that_ happen?"
Paul: "Keep playing, it gets better..."
Another individual whom beta-tested my game was my other cousin, Tim
McLaughlin. He had a fun time exploiting the bugs in the game to his
advantage:
Tim: (issues a GO NORTH command) "Ok, I just moved north..."
Paul: "You can use abbreviations, you know..."
Tim: "Really? Coooollll...."
Paul: "Try typing: GO NO instead of GO NORTH."
Tim: "Ok...Oh, neat! I like that feature!"
Tim: "Can I pick up the tree?"
Paul: "No."
Tim: (issues a GET TREE command in the forest) "It says 'Ok.' "
Paul: "Huh?"
Paul: "Check your inventory..."
Tim: (INVENTORY command reveals that he now has the TWO-HANDED SWORD)
"What the heck?"
Paul: "Wait a minute!..."
The development of the game progressed from a simple two-word parser
(courtesy of an issue of Compute!'s Gazette) to the remodeling from the
initial C64 version and finally into the form described at the beginning
of this article. In time, I managed to play a MUD online via telnet,
and I then modeled the Village Shop after it (or at least I tried). This
proved unremarkable, as there were several bugs in the Shop routine of
the game.
I also discovered that the WIELD command tacked on a "(wielded)." text
string to the end of any item that the player attempted to wield. This led
to a most frustating error:
>inventory
>You are carrying:
BACKPACK.
LANTERN.
TWO-HANDED SWORD (wielded).(wielded).
PLAY VALUE, MOST IMPORTANT
Despite the bugs in the game, Westfront had some redeeming play value
in that it taught the end user patience. Sorely lacking in the game was
thorough or even partially complete instructions. There was a nice
introduction, to be sure, but the HELP command during gameplay displayed
6 terrible suggestions, among them:
"5. Relax. Think as the computer would. If a noun or verb doesn't make
sense, take a break from the computer and come back later on, refreshed and
ready to try again."
Needless to say, both Ryan and Tim scoffed at the HELP command's
usefulness!
HOW THE GAME VANISHED, PLUS WHAT I LEARNED
My most interesting game ever, "West Front to Apse", vanished when the
infamous "Save-With-Replace" bug took the last bite out of my already
finished masterpiece. Never mind the over eight months I spent, sometimes
without sleep, coding the game from scratch. Or the countless hours I
also spent debugging it as my cousins Ryan and Tim would play it.
It was 206 blocks long in BASIC 7.0. It included sprites and a nice
storyline. It eventually becomes my Windows masterpiece "Westfront PC: The
Trials of Guilder." And now, unfortunately, it was simply gone!
Portcommodore.com warns against the "Save-With-Replace" bug in the
following direct manner:
"Though there is one thing you MUST NOT do, and that is the save with
replace. Saving and replacing a file (example SAVE"@0:(file name)",8) has
a bug in most of the 1541 drives and can cause other files to be lost. If
you wish to save a file with the same name as a previous file do this:
OPEN 15,8,15,"S0:(file name)":CLOSE 15 (scratch the old one)
SAVE"(file name)",8 (save the new one)"
I didn't pay attention to the bug back in 1995. I do now. However,
luckily for me, I had saved older versions of the game, albeit from the
first two or three months of creation, on several other disks scattered
about my collection. I saved two of the game's sprites, the title and
the interior surface map.
I had even managed to keep another text adventure I wrote, which I
literally merged in the final month of Westfront's coding ...into the BASIC
code! Westfront was thus two text adventures merged into one big game!
Westfront was also the culmination of playing the following Commodore
64/128 games, plus online MUDs, prior to 1995:
The Pawn (C64, by Firebird)
Zork I (C64, by Infocom)
"Lusty Mud" (a family LP Mud, despite the name)
Enchanter (C64, also by Infocom)
Castle Adventure (C64, by David Malmberg)
Dark Fortress (C128, from Ahoy! magazine)
Crypt of Fear (C64, also from Ahoy! magazine)
Vampyre Hunter (C64, from Compute!'s Gazette magazine)
All of the games above were played by me, relentlessly, between 1987
and 1995. I played and played and played these games for hours on end,
until I was blue in the face. In the abscence of a girlfriend, these were
my girlfriends. One keystroke by lovely keystroke at a time. Ok, I was
insane. Sue me.
THE FIRST ROOMS IN AN 80-ROOM, TWO CONTINENT ADVENTURE
In April of 1993, I wrote the first version of "West Front to Apse" on
the Commodore 64. I based part of the title off of the film 'All Quiet on the
Western Front'. Why I named it "West Front" is beyond me, but that's the
title the current version of my infamous "Westfront" lineup enjoys. I don't
know, maybe I had/have a penchant for creating weird games with even
weirder names, huh? :)
Anyway, sometime in the summer of 1993 I finished up a 16-room
adventure game, with Smurf village thrown in just for laughs. I never
intended to ever publish the game, and quite frankly, plenty of online
MUDs had Smurf Village as well. Ryan thought it was humorous, and thus
it stayed in the game.
I returned to the source code (originally written for the Commodore
64) around a year later. By this time I had decided to do a better text
adventure, but this time in the native language of the Commodore 128:
BASIC 7.0. "BASIC 7.0" had around 122kb of total data space to work
with, about 4 times as large as the Commodore 64 (38kb). This was good
enough for me, and so in May of 1994, I rewrote the game for the Commodore
128 mode.
THE OPENING ACT IN WEST FRONT TO APSE
By the fall of 1995, the game was nearing completion. I added in a
second area set in Oslo, Norway, with an island off to the west I based off
of the Flora Isles west of Bergen. This fact molded with fiction was
interesting enough for me to also turn to books for plot inspiration. I even
added a few sequences from one of my favorite Choose Your Own Adventure
series books, 'Return to the Cave of Time" (1985, #50) into the game.
Finally, I added a villian (in name only) straight out of Will
Wright's 'The Immortal' (Nintendo NES, 1989). The name of the villian was
"Mordimar", which was the same one as in "The Immortal". I just thought
the name was cool and so, why not, I added it. He was this evil sorcerer
who stood in the way of the game's completion and I felt Gargamel was
too wimpy to be the end guy. He could shoot lightning bolts from his
hands, so he must have been a bad dude, right? Anybody who can fry people
with their bare hands deserves a part in the next blockbuster action movie
opposite James Bond.
After playing Phantasy Star 2 on the Sega Genesis (Genesis, 1990), I
added the ultimate weapon of the game. For some reason I named it the "Ang
Sword". I think "Ang" was a character in the game, or his sword happened
to be in a dungeon. Hell, I don't know. I was 18 years old at the time and
fresh out of ideas for game items. I also turned to the "Beginner's Guide"
of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (TSR Hobbies, 1979) for game ideas. I threw
in several swords, a flask of oil, a coil of rope, food rations, spikes,
wolfsbane, a lantern, and of course monsters, too. The game needed
them, and so I added them.
Anyway, I eventually finished coding the game, and by the end of June
1996, I asked people on the newsgroup "comp.sys.cbm" if they wanted a copy
of my game. I believe I sent one or two people the game.
HOW I LOST $250 TRYING TO FIND "THE LOST DISK"
I spent $250 and about a year of my time looking to "recover" the same
disk, which "Save-With-Replace" had eaten previously. The disk directory
still listed. The game was still there, including a backup copy on the
same side of the disk, but the Commodore 128 would give me a "?READ ERROR"
about 10 "clicks" into the game load process. This amounted to around the
188th block of the game. I was a mere 18 blocks short!
I then formatted over the game, thinking I had a backup copy
elsewhere, and then it hit me. Oh God! No! I didn't...
I tried various Commodore 64 disk utility software packages to restore
my mistake. All sorts were tried, including Di-Sector, Fast Hack' em, Omni-
Clone, Maverick, and Epyx's FastLoad cartridge. However, minimal success
was attained, if any. I had to rely on older versions from 1994, before
I added Norway and Mordimar and any of the interesting stuff.
I am now working to redo the game (using all of the data and sprites I
can glean from my programming disks). I am also working solely from my memory,
from what I remember of the game.
The new version won't be 100% like the original, but it will be at
least 90% like the original because most of the data structures for the room
locations survived. Except Norway. But who cares, I looked up the information
on Norway in an encyclopedia, which I still have, and thus can try again.
The good news is that this game will be placed up on the web when I am
finished redoing it. All the Commodore 64 and 128 users out there can
enjoy the game, in .D64 format, from this website as well as www.ifarch
ive.org. Names from popular cartoon shows used in the game will be
altered slightly to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits. But the game
will be more or less in the spirit of the original, for all to enjoy!
When I finally get around to locating that damn disk, I'll put up this
game -- bugs and all -- for others to experience and enjoy. Mostly, I'd
like to pay homage to my Commodore roots and re-release a version for
Windows (without the bugs). For now, I am left searching for that long
lost disk, hoping one day to resurrect the game in full. Although a
partially complete version was resurrected a month ago, it contained only
the first 40 or so rooms and had yet to implement many of the verbs (only
the first 12 were completed, out of 31). I will work to find the complete
version, and once that turns up you can bet this page will be replaced
by something more informative.
UPDATE: JULY 24, 2003
I located an old version of my game! Upon reworking it, I have managed
to recover 85% of the game as it was (minus the Smurf Village, which was
changed to something else). Click below to visit the page:
http://panks.freeshell.org/pauladv.html
(Scroll down to "Enchanter: West Front to Apse" to download the game).
Sincerely,
Paul Allen Panks
dun...@yahoo.com
--
pa...@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org