At the end of last year I decided to write a port of the Commodore 64 game H.E.R.O. for the Dick Smith VZ200 and VZ300 computers.
I wrote it using the Multi-Platform Arcade Game Designer software. This makes it much easier to design games since it has built-in sprite and code designing all in the one package.
H.E.R.O title screen
You fly your backpack helicopter around the various caves and try to rescue the trapped miners. You will need to use dynamite to blow up walls blocking your progress and shoot critters with your laser gun.
In-game screenshot
It was quite fun to make and I’m glad it’s completed so others can enjoy the game.
There’s a link on the Blue Bilby website to the itch.io page for the game.
This is a game created by Shallan50k. I was watching his stream as he made it and contributed a few funky sprites to the game. Lots of fun to play! Give it a go 🙂
And the fun thing is, I can ride him! Altho he’s not very fast. In fact, he’s slower than I walk I think haha!
Riding my companion!
I also set up electricity at my base. My graphics card would only take glitched photos, though. I did take a photo using the built-in Photo Mode in NMS but damned if I can find where it was saved (if at all). I Googled around but it seems it often does not work.
Twin solar panels and twin batteries powering my storage and Teleporter!
Now I can teleport to the Space Station (or any other teleport locations) and back home again! Woot! 🙂
I managed to fight off some attacks by enemies during my missions tonight. I didn’t even die this time! I got a Forged Passport. This is used when you do some dodgy stuff. You turn it in at the core of a Space Station to reset your reputation. It’s just like you weren’t even doing anything dodgy at all!
Also, my Spaceship got stuck in my home base after I teleported back one time:
Spaceship stuck in home base building.
I could still get inside it and take off, so that was fine. However, if I got in it and back out again it’d place me inside the roof of the base building and I could not get back out of that. Luckily I could still click on the Spaceship and get into the cockpit to take off.
As you can see from the last screenshot I’m doing a mission called Alone Amidst the Stars.
I decided to try out a new game I’ve had in my Steam Library for forever. No Man’s Sky. You start out on a barren planet and need to find your spaceship and repair it.
Me and my Spaceship in a Space Station.
At first I thought it was going to be annoyingly complex, but after persisting for a bit I actually started to enjoy it. I started on an ice planet and got to the stage I could build a base. I didn’t want to live on a cold ice planet as your exo-suit would use up its resources too quickly and often dealing with the cold. I flew to another planet and it was pretty much the same, so I did some exploring and mining with my hand laser using my Multi-tool.
I flew off again and landed in a Space Station — not the actual one in the photo above.. but they all pretty much look the same inside anyways. heh.
I found out I needed to upgrade my exo-suit but did not have any nanites which you purchase them with, so headed off again after updating my outfit and chatting to some locals to learn some of their dialect.
I found a nice planet and made it my home. It’s a bit cold at night but during the day it’s a nice 20C or so and my exo-suit doesn’t need so many resources filled often. I found an old, abandoned outpost which I had been directed to for a mission. Even though it’s a bit dilapidated, it’s a nice enough place so I made it my home. There’s other stuff to explore not far away and I can fly around the planet doing some exploring.
I did manage to die a couple of times. Once was from an animal attacking me out of nowhere. I came back and got my stuff and then I was gathering Whispering Eggs. You can gather a Larval Core from them which sells quite highly on the market, but when you do it spawns a bunch of Biological Horrors (!) who then attack you. It seems to be worth it, though as the money you get is a good amount for a beginner.
I’m currently on a mission to research minerals for a group in order to make some money. I am having a lot of fun running around on various, randomised planets seeing different fauna and flora which I can scan and gain credits for doing so. I can also use the Multi-tool to mine rocks, plants or big veins of ores to either sell or refine into something else. I recently got an HyperDrive to quickly visit other planets so I’m far away from home.
While on a planet I shot at some sentinels. You can gather some resources they drop when they die but they’ll quickly call other sentinels to come after you. I thought I’d be clever and shoot down a few then fly away in my Spaceship. Sadly, I soon discovered they have spaceships they can send after you. I shot down about 6 of them before I ran out of shields and could not repair them. I also could not escape the planet’s atmosphere because the Pulse Drive will not fire if enemies are nearby. Since they just kept coming and coming there was no way for me to get away from them so they destroyed my ship. I spawned back on the Space Station and flew my replacement ship back to my ‘Grave’ to pick up resources left behind, then went back to the Space Station and logged off.
Lots of fun was had and I think this will be my main game to play for a while — at least until Valheim and Satisfactory get their updates we’ve been waiting on!
I was looking through posts on Reddit the other day and came across a suggestion of a game called Vintage Story.
It’s kind of like Minecraft, but not. It is being developed by some programmers who were developing a Minecraft mod called VintageCraft. They also integrated a lot of ideas from TerraFirmaCraft. TFC was a mod of Minecraft which aimed to make things more realistic — ie. no punching trees. You have to collect sticks. To make weapons in the early game you need to pick up flint rocks and ‘knap’ the shape into an axe-head, knife-blade, etc then craft them together to make the weapons / tools. It’s quite cool.
