We’ve certainly featured our fare share of Castlevania inspired games over the years, especially the most impressive Castlevania Spectral Interlude for the ZX Spectrum, the upcoming Akumajou Dracula AGA for the Amiga and even Maria Renard’s Revenge, which is yet another upcoming Castlevania fan for the same system. Well here we are with another shout out for this classic, as Saberman has informed us that Thelen is working on a Castlevania game but for the Atari XL/XE with VBXE. To coincide with this news, Saberman has done a new gameplay video which gives us a first look at this early development!
Here is what Thelen says about the early stages of Castlevania VBXE via the AtariAge forums “I wanted to share some sort of demo of what I’m working on for the past few months. I thought, after having my 1st VBXE since 2009, it was time to really do something dedicated with it, I was thinking, such a cool add-on – and not that much support… (I did some tests back in those 2009 days, and ended with a little demo that also worked without VBXE). It’s a funny adventure so far, I’ve learned how to make a scroller, which just doesn’t scroll threw the ram, but with double buffering. Also learning about blit-lists, how to use them properly. Really nice to see how people work with it.
“At first I wanted to use the original NES tiles/gfx and make a sort of replica, but I did a little upgrading, because the VBXE is more capable than that. Also made it so that the scroll engine so far can use levels which are built with the ’tiled’ app so it’s easy to design a level, If the tiles are ready. And yes, there is a little bug in the scroller, that will be fixed, but wasn’t the main priority so far. Things working so far are the scroller and Simon. I also looked at using the original NES 6502 code, but I thought it would be easier to start from scratch”.
“Staying motivated (and being busy with life) to keep working on bigger projects like this is always a little bit tricky for me. Perhaps starting a something smaller game was better 😉 Either way, it’s so far a nice challenge. And yes, there’s a lot of work to do. The random color on top is the place where the score/indicators will be.”
Links :1) Forum 2) Download 3) VBXE
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