 My first attempt at writing an assembly
language game was a version of arcade Frogger for the TRS-80 Model 1. I had
reached the stage where the program would draw up all of the graphics and
was ready to start the animation when I felt that what I had done so far,
could have been done much better and more efficiently. I decided to discard
the Frogger project and instead made my first commercial grade game Stellar
Odyssey which was written in BASIC with assembly language (M/L) subroutines.
After completing Stellar Odyssey, I felt better prepared to tackle a full
assembly language game project again and Cosmic Bomber was the result.
The idea was based on the last level of arcade Pheonix where you need to
destroy the Mother Ship as it hovered ahead but I added the element of falling
and exploding bombs to add to the challenge. This plus a few ideas from arcade
Space Invaders where the enemy is slowly coming in to land and invade, added
a sense of tension as the player had to complete his mission before this
time limit was reached.
It was a good game except for one major disaster... I'VE LOST IT !!
I lost all the source code and even the final binaries! Don't ask me how
because I don't recall but if anyone can help me out by sending me a copy
of my own game, it would be GREATLY appreciated.
Original Story Pretext
"The screen flashes at you "Bomber craft in range" and you prepare yourself
for battle. The Aliens are back to destroy you but this time, it's you against
the Mother Ship. You must penetrate through the bottom of the craft to kill
the alien gunner within. But be careful for the alien is loading his bomb
racks and once they're full, they begin dropping and exploding on the ground. At the same time, the bomber is coming down to land and invade Earth! Beware
the bomber craft's escort ship hovering above firing high speed missiles
at you. Earth is depending on you comrade so give them all you've got !!
"
Wow! These story lines just getter better and better don't they !?
:)
Development Notes
Cosmic Bomber was actually a good game, especially considering it was my
first full assembly language game. I have no screenshots of the game but
I at least do have all my hand written notes and programming lists so technically,
I could re-enter it all into an assembler and re-draw all the graphics... but
I'm not that bored yet!
Here I have two scanned images of the video display graphics sheets that
I designed the graphics on. Doesn't it look great?! You'd hardly pick that
it was done on a low resolution monochrome system like the TRS-80 Model 1.
:)
Marketing
Looking at my invoice books of all my sales for that era, I can see why the
game hasn't surfaced on any web sites. Only one copy appears to have been
sold and that was to a distributor so I don't know who actually ended up
buying the game. I guess to summarise the marketing of Cosmic Bomber, it
would be safe to say that it was practically non-existant judging by the
sales.
I guess I would wait till at least the next game before I would become a
multi-millionaire game programmer. :)
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