The Strategic Map

The overarching goal of the game was for the player to unify Britain, initially under the rule of 15 other kings. For this portion of the game, I designed two fairly conventional subgames. The first was a strategic game showing a huge scrolling map of England. This in itself was no big deal; I had done scrolling maps in two previous games, and there were no important innovations here.

One minor technological problem arose from our memory requirements. Even with a fully loaded Atari 800, the game simply wouldn't fit into RAM. I had expected this and developed a system for swapping different modules in and out of RAM from the floppy disk. Nowadays this kind of thing is routine, but I didn't have modern memory managers; I had to overlay segments by hand.

The player, upon leaving the castle at Camelot, would appear on the map at Camelot's location. He could then travel around England with his army in tow. When he crossed the border into another kingdom, his knights would immediately set to work ravaging the land, stealing cattle and anything else they could carry away. The enemy king could come out of his castle with his army and fight a battle with Arthur, or remain safely inside the castle. If the enemy did choose to fight, then a third subgame began: the battle.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net