It took a little bit of doing (as these things always do), but I’ve finally managed to figure out how I packed the Frak! levels *sigh*, and now have a little lump of C code that outputs them nicely as TGA files. So, here they are:
Level 1 – The Name of the Game
The enemy / meany here was the Scrubbly, nicely designed by Daryl Craig-Elliot (‘DCE’ in the high-score table).
The level design spells out the name of the game, if you didn’t already know this!
Level 2 – The Jungle Level
Here, the enemy/meany is the Poglet, that I named in honour of my youngest sister’s childhood nickname. But I have to say that I can’t, 35 years on, remember for the life of me why I designed it the way I did. It just looked cool, I guess.
This level didn’t spell out any secret message (apart from “Paul Is Dead”, if you play it backwards). The idea behind the design was simply to make getting to the end of it a little more spatially difficult than the first level.
Level 3 – The City Level
The final enemy/meany was the Hooter. My original plan was for the Hooters to jump up and down every couple of seconds, and so I kept the Hooters small to prevent them slowing the game down too much. Alas, even small jumpy Hooters proved to be more than the poor old Beeb could manage, so I ended up having to disable their jumping quite late in the day.
The level itself (again) doesn’t spell out anything, but I included some slightly tricky sections, such as the pair of side-by-side chains near the end that you have to jump past (i.e. you have to make the jump and then immediately let go of the Up-button, or else Trogg will catch hold of the chains instead of sailing past them). This level also requires a bit more spatial awareness than the first two levels. Which is nice.
Thanks for those, its great to see you doing something beeb related again and your not the only one who uses TGAs 🙂