Best Games - Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin
The Intellivision video game console started development in 1977. The state of consumer processors in 1977 wasn’t really geared toward high fidelity gaming experiences. A lot of arcade machines of the time were still black and white and the most common video game that the public was familiar with was Pong. Pong isn’t a bad game, but no one would describe it as deep or dynamic. The core of the machine was a CP1610. This was an update to a processor that was already close to a decade old at that point. CPUs in the ‘70s didn’t advance at the pace that they do now, but this wasn’t exactly state of the art hardware. The good thing about any computer hardware is that it is always more capable than it seems at first glance. Given enough time and energy, people will come up with all sorts of interesting ways to use a processor or pool of memory. Things that seem impossible become common. Operations that used to take seconds are refined to the point that they happen before a CRT screen can draw the next frame. There are limits, of course. You can‘t run Doom on an Intellivision. Still, the games released in the early ‘80s bear very little resemblance to the games released at launch. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin seems like it shouldn’t even exist on the same platform. It’s astounding. Treasures of Tarmin is the second AD&D game for the Intellivision. The first is a fairly basic, but fun, roguelike. Now I can’t be sure if it takes any inspiration from Rogue, or if both games are simply dipping into the same Dungeons and Dragons well. Either could be true. In any case, Treasure of Tarmin does a much better job with the material. Both were made by the same single developer, Tom Loughry. Treasures of Tarmin is a sprawling, first person, adventure game where you will have to explore dungeons, battle a legion of different monsters, collect and manage a fairly intricate yet intuitive inventory, and level up your weapons and items. It defies belief that this one guy was able to pack that much into a cartridge that couldn’t fit a JPEG. And a pretty small one at that. I could attempt to describe the game, but you already know what it is. Imagine wandering around a meandering dungeon, picking up items and using them to smite skeletons, goblins, and the like. You know, D&D stuff. It would be a few years before a game like Legend of Zelda would come along to advance console adventure gaming. For the most part, I imagine that developers simply didn’t think that it was possible. To create a wide ranging, dynamic adventure you needed the memory, processing, and storage space of a full blown personal computer. And they wouldn’t be wrong. There are very few outliers like Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin. It’s surprisingly deep and fully featured. This was an early 80s game made on late 70s hardware, and it can still manage to surprise all these decades later. AD&D Treasure of Tarmin is one of the best games.
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Recently, I tried drawing on actual paper. I mean, this isn’t a new thing. I used to draw on paper. I still scratch things out on paper all the time. Just rough notepad sketches when I’m testing out an idea or figuring out a shape. But I never actually draw on paper anymore. Not proper drawing. Not something I want to finish. It feels a little strange.
I used to draw on paper all the time. Like actually all the time. I spent years doing it. I bought special pencils for drawing. Then, when I realized I liked different pencils better, I bought those instead. Then I bought boxes of entirely different pencils, because these new ones turned out to be so much more to my liking. I tended toward the blue and red ones. Pencils with just the right amount of pigment and wax so the lines could stay sharp when I wanted and flow when I tilted my hand just so. I bought special paper too. Paper with just the right amount of tooth and snap. Paper that wasn’t too white, wasn’t too thin. Paper that matched my style of drawing. Whatever I thought that was. When I recently went to draw on paper, I couldn’t even find my pencils. I had become so divorced from the act of drawing on paper that the tools to do the job weren’t nearby. My IPad pencil is literally right in front of me as I type this. I still draw all the time. I draw at the very least several times a week. Some weeks it’s every day. But all of my drawing is done on a computer or a tablet. All of my drawing is done digitally. I can imagine that there is some loss of romance to that. The act of putting pencil to paper should mean something. Making actual physical marks on real paper. Spreading molecules of tinted medium across plant fibres in a way that is permanent. In a way that will probably outlive me. That should mean something, right? I found my pencils and I sketched in a sketch book. What I discovered is that I didn’t feel it. Whatever caveman part of my brain that should respond to the act of physical drawing, I didn’t have it. Drawing digitally, with a glowing screen and an electronic pencil feels just as natural to me now as using graphite… or whatever is stuffed inside these really great pencils that I have. It didn’t feel bad when I drew on paper. It just didn’t seem to matter. What I craved was the result. I want the smooth mark created by the arc my wrist and arm. I want the illusion of dimensionality created in a flat image. I want the soft gradient I make when I vary the pressure of my hand and the speed of my movement. I want the result and the process, but I don’t have any particular affinity toward how I go about that. Digital is fine by me. As long as that’s an option, I’ll probably continue to draw that way. An update from the writing front. I only have one story out for submission as I type this (though when you read this, it will probably be at least two). So that isn’t great. But I did enter a new story writing contest, so that’s a bit better.
Story writing contests are a bit weird. I don’t actually care that much about how my story places in the contest. I am more concerned with the motivation and the deadline. This contest is a Halloween-ish thing with no particular theme, but you are given two prompts that can be fairly abstract. Each person entering the contest will be provided prompts by another entrant. They can be a word, a phrase, a picture, sort of whatever. There should be a fairly wild array of stories that spawn from this format. We all have one month to write a story under 5000 words. After that, we all review the stories, choose our favourites, and rank them. Maybe when I’m done writing I will write here what my prompts were. Maybe. No matter what happens, I win, because I will have a new story at the end of everything. At least that’s what’s supposed to happen. If I actually get this story done remains to be seen. Based on the prompts I got, this story might be a little heavy. Not because the prompts were heavy, but what they made me think of is. So really, I suppose that’s on me, and not the prompts. I took a few minutes out of writing that story to write this post. Maybe I should get back to the story. I put up an image a few weeks ago. It was a screen capture of a game I have been working on for a little bit. Here it is again. That shot was from the old version of the game. This one is from the new version. I can imagine that most people won’t see much difference between the two. Sure, the background is different, and the character looks a little different, the second one isn't so horrifically zoomed in, but other than that it probably doesn’t look like much has changed.
The first image is entirely 2D. The images are sprites layered one on top of the other. The second image is a blend of 2D textures and 3D models. Getting to this point hasn’t been easy, and I can guess that some folks might not understand why I made the change in the first place. I have spent a lot of years learning how to create art and animation in 3D and I know there are a few things that I can get away with if I work in 3D. The only problem here is I want this game to have a certain 2D retro look. So that means making 3D look like 2D. While that might generally be considered more difficult than just working in 2D from the start, I decided that the benefits were worth it. My hope is that this game looks weird. That people who play it won’t be able to decide what is going on with it. Is it an old 2D arcade game? Is it a modern 3D game? If I do everything right, it will be both, and neither. With a bit of luck, it will look interesting. |
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