Blurp

= Blurp =

Licence
Non-Profit Commercial

Background
Onslaught is a game I started to write with my friend, Matt Godbolt, many years ago. We'd seen a game called Teddy Boy (YouTube link) on the Sega Master System and loved it - very simple, but incredibly addictive. We decided to see if the Beeb was up to capturing the same addictive gameplay, and Onslaught was the result.

Back then, the Beeb games scene was waning - we'd sent an early version to Superior Software for evaluation, but they'd told us they were no longer interested in publishing BBC games (and no surprise, given how few copies the last few released games sold!). But we loved Onslaught - it was genuinely fun to play, and it felt a little bit different in style and gameplay from anything else we'd played on the Beeb, with lots of moving characters, dot explosions, and plenty of action.

We couldn't let it disappear into the aether, unseen and forgotten. So we approached Acorn User magazine, who seemed really excited about publishing a series of articles following its progress, alongside type-in listings each month showing the evolution of the game as we developed it. It was a nice idea, but unfortunately too much work for us, because of course the game was developed so chaotically, with messy and sometimes hacked-together code, that we needed days to tidy it up and impose some kind of fake narrative and order upon it. The following month, Acorn User dropped all support for the 8-bit machines too, and so too Onslaught was dropped, until about 5 years ago when I sent a copy to the Stairway to Hell archive...

Resurrection
I'd been working on a little BBC game called Blurp for years, an attempt to capture the same spirit of gameplay as Onslaught, but using newly-found BBC Micro techniques to create very smooth scrolling - see Rich Tech 2. It was in fact a conversion of something we'd written on the Archimedes of the same name, which was itself supposed to be an improved version of Onslaught. Recently (March 2012) I decided to attempt to resurrect a disc image of Archimedes Blurp, the results of which can be found [[Media:Blurp.zip|here]].

But on the Archimedes, it never had the same "fun factor" as the Beeb original, and meanwhile my BBC conversion of Blurp using the Rich Tech 2 engine, while technically smart, led me down dead ends constantly - mainly out of the restrictions which came from having only 1/50th of a second to update a frame. While it might've been possible to design something that would run smoothly, I started to doubt whether it would actually be any fun - and if it's no fun, what's the point!

At the moment, there are quite a few people developing fun little games for the Beeb, and it got me thinking - perhaps I could pick up Onslaught where I left off, make a few improvements, add lots more content, and release it as it was originally intended to be, before we simplified it for the purposes of a magazine type-in game. Maybe I can get this finished by Christmas, as something of a little present to the community - well, we'll see.

And so, this diary was born...

Diary
MediaWiki was begging me to split this page up into bits, so now we have a page for each entry...