[Kde-games-devel] New levels in KGoldrunner

[Ian Wadham]

Well, I was really hoping some people would try out the new game
and give Stephen and me some feedback.  My "P.S." was intended
to make that a bit easier, not start a thread on GUI style ... :-)

On Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:34:26 pm Richard Hartmann wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 11:07, Ian Wadham <ianw2 at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> > P.S.  Like State of Terror, this game makes heavy use of the
> > quirk in KGoldrunner that lets you dig while falling ... ;-)
>
> Maybe include that as an option which themes/game packs
> can en/disable?
>
Been there, done that ... before KGoldrunner was in KDE Games ... :-)

Marco Krueger's original code followed KGoldrunner Rules, but these
would not work with the levels our family had composed for Apple II -
hence the Traditional Rules option.  Marco suggested I make each of
the differences an option, but that does not work very well, because
some levels rely on one difference and some on another.  Levels
can become impossible, too easy or downright boring when you
change individual rules - and not in an easily predictable way -
ergo not good for end-users.  Even changing the whole set of rules
can ruin a level or make it more fun - but the doco warns about that.

The dig-while-falling "feature" was a bug (i.e. not possible in Apple II),
but before I could fix it my son Peter wrote a level based on it (Vengeance
of Peter W, - level 1 - Impossible?), so I let it stand "temporarily".  And
then along came Stuart Popejoy with State of Terror and the bug had to
become a "feature".  There were other bugs in KGoldrunner Rules that
showed up in Stuart's levels and had to be fixed, so Stuart had to re-design 
parts of his levels.  We had a good time negotiating ...

Part of the fun of the original games on Apple and Commodore was
that there were these "cheats" you could discover - some of them bugs.

The story goes that Doug Smith, the original author of Loderunner, was
only able to produce about 30 of the 150 levels he had promised his
publisher, Broderbund Software (it is very hard to compose good levels).
So Doug outsourced the job to the neighbourhood kids.

    See http://entropymine.com/jason/lr/misc/ldhist.html

I think many of the tricks the kids discovered were bugs, such as being
able in some cases to push an enemy up a ladder ahead of you, rather
than having him come down and get you.  This blurring between bugs
and features gives me a lot of enjoyment when working with KGr.

BTW I have been chasing for years a KGr "bug" where all the enemies
start falling - through bricks and concrete even - and eventually they
all vanish through the floor ...  If I could find out how to reproduce it,
should I fix it or design a game around it? ... ;-) ... Heh, heh ... :-)

All the best, Ian W.