During 2024 I had decided to work on yet another game I’d been thinking about creating for years. A Vic 20 one as well. Who’d have thought that my mind would be coming around to knocking out another one of those. As it turned out, it would be the only game I fully completed and made public that year.
I’d been determined to release at least one game in 2023, which was Gridrunner, and wanted to keep my momentum and do the same for 2024. So, between October and December 2024, I worked on a remake of – what I considered to be – the classic Revenge of the Quadra.
For those of you who don’t remember this one – probably a lot of you, this was a Vic 20 +8K game released by Software Super Savers back in, I believe, 1984. They were a budget label, as I recall, so it was probably a cheap release back in the day but I remember buying my copy from a charity shop after school one day, when I found it among a load of C64 tapes I’d just browsed through as I was considering the upgrade at the time.
This game was an outright shoot-em up of which the Vic 20 had more than enough of already but, as it used the expansion memory, there was a lot more room to do some clever stuff, which made for a more exciting game. Like Matrix, I was always more impressed with this game on a technical level, even though it was a damn good game to play as well. It’s intro sequence, although only played on initially loading up, and not repeatable unless you reloaded the tape, featured some simple credits and game information swooping down the screen in a kind of V formation and the letters literally exploding into chunks and flying off the screen once they stopped moving. I always wanted to recreate that effect in games I’ve done and here I had the chance to do it exactly like the original did. It was stuff like this that really pulled me towards making my own version of the game, so off I went.
Ironically, at the end of developing it (I literally finished it on New Years Eve, otherwise it would have been a 2025 game) I realised that I hadn’t actually done that for any text at all, and used a completely different kind of effect for the end level screen as well. I did it for the bad guys, though, and that’s what we all really want to see. Aliens being blown to bits when we shoot at them. What’s not to like?
I’m writing this in April, 2026 now, so it’s been around 16 months since I last even looked at the code, so I can’t really remember a lot of the development process on this one, short of remembering it went relatively smoothly for once. As in I didn’t really fall into many problem areas that blocked me progressing compared to usual. I’d watched the gameplay on video as well as playing the game for a few hours, just to make sure I’d catch anything that I’d never seen as a player back in the day – because, like most Vic 20 games, it was bloody hard.
The game itself involves aliens moving along a path at the top of the screen and you’ve got to destroy a certain amount of them. While contending with them, you also have multiple rows of different sized asteroids scrolling both left and right (although just left in my version as, for some daft reason, I never noticed until too late) in-between you and the bad guys. Said asteroids being the primary source of all these meaty explosions I was going on about earlier.
These aliens aren’t just empty vessels however, and every so often one or two (and more later) will start dropping down the screen in an attempt to grab one of the many pods at the bottom of the screen. They then take these to the top of the screen where they are vaporised. It’s kind of like how Defender does it, but on a vertical axis, I guess. Of course, if you shoot the little git first, then it gets destroyed and your pod falls gradually back to earth. Lose all your pods, or all your player ships then it’s game over.
Of course there’s a bit more to it than that because that’s not really much of a game. You have aliens that drop at the right or left side of the screen that have no interest in pods and will just wait until they get to the same vertical location as you and then sacrifice themselves by spawning a right/left firing missile that you really need to be quick to avoid. And then you have the mysterious blob…
I say mysterious, loosely speaking, because I don’t know what the hell it actually did. In the game you just shot it a few times and eventually it went boom and you, I assume got a few points. Even in recent play-through’s I couldn’t work out if it had another purpose, and I never got far enough to see it when I played the game originally. Watching video’s didn’t help much either. It just appeared in the centre of the screen and waited to be shot. So I created it anyway and threw it in the mix. Too late to wonder about all that now.
So, as I said earlier, it was a relatively smooth development process over a couple of months. I made my own object graphics because it’s Vic 20 8*8 blocks, and even I can draw crude graphics with those. Sound effects were knocked together with Bfx’er, if I remember correctly, and my Gamemaker framework had stuff like high score functions, sound routines and all sorts of other stuff from other games that could be refactored to save time with some of the more complex bits. I think the only real issue I had for a day or so was trying to make sure the aliens dropped at the correct point so they matched up with the pod at the bottom of the screen correctly when picking it up because I went for pixel scrolling instead of the 8 pixel block that the original game would have used.
Oh, yeah, and I developed an inertia system for the player ship just to make it more interesting, as I’d never tried to do anything like that before. I wasn’t too sure about forcing people to play with that, however, so I did make it an optional game setting.
This was one of the few games of recent years that I’ve written that was not done for a Syntax bomb game competition, so it went out there without any word really, apart from publishing on my Itch.io page. I did later put it up on Opera but have never received anything near the feedback I got for Gridrunner, though.
On a side note, as I hadn’t quite finished it at Xmas 2024 (I put it online on New Years Eve), I did stick it on a usb stick in its current form and get my nephew to do some play testing on it for me, in case I did need to change anything more than a bit of presentation. I’d done the same with Gridrunner but he was playing the final version then as I’d released it a few days earlier. He seemed to like Quadra more – which surprised me – and spent a large chunk of Xmas day afternoon playing it for high scores.
On a side note, it’s turned out to be one of my own games that I often go back to and have a quick game or two on – like Gridrunner and Validius. Definitely a shoot-em up fan, I am.
