The Story of Westfront to Apse By: Paul Panks (lumberjacks76@lycos.com) INTRODUCTION 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). Go to my main page to download it. Sincerely, Paul Allen Panks lumberjacks76@lycos.com