Leadlight Gamma - hopefully before the end of 2013

I hope that before 2013 ends I’ll have released my now near complete port of Leadlight to Glulx, which I’m calling ‘Leadlight Gamma.’

Originally I had no desire at all to port the game anywhere, what with its Apple II-ness. But unresolved plans to do a sequel in Inform led me to start poking some of the data from the first game into Inform for fun one night. And I got hooked on what was a strange reverse engineering task, and on revisiting the gameworld. So then I took to doing a serious job of the port.

Leadlight Gamma is, in the first place, a faithful port of Apple II Leadlight. A game played in one version should be identical to a game played in the other in terms of dice rolls, commands, prose, scoring and all other mechanics, and even in some of the most obscure idiosyncracies of the original parser. But there are still a lot of inadvertent niceties in the Inform version. You only had 4 save slots on the Apple II, so you’ll only have 4 in glulx, but saving will be as easy as it was on the Apple II, except now it’s instantaneous as well. EG: You’ll just type ‘a1’ to autosave to slot 1 and it’s done; no dialogue boxes come up and there are no interruptions, no file names to type or think about.

Also, there are going to be some just outright new features:

  • A customisable, zoomable graphic automap
  • Graphic title page
  • Minor audio embellishment
  • Unlockable tour mode, scoring aid and easter eggs

It’d be cool if this could be played online, but glulx online interpretation isn’t up to all the features yet, so it’ll be offline play all the way.

Anyway if you had thought about playing the original game, but hadn’t got to it yet or were put off by the (MINOR!!!) inconvenience of dealing with the emulation, you may wanna hold out for Leadlight Gamma so you can do it all Informly.

  • Wade

Cool!

I’m quite interested in how you’ll organize the save states, among other (and much bigger) things.

Is one of the easter eggs to make a bright blue screen with white text? That would be awesome.

Also, Informly, informally–ha.