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Flight of a Dragon is finally completed!
This is an assembly of a few screenshots from my game (view full to see an animation), Flight of a Dragon, released for the Uzebox console, a true 8 bit hackery built around an AVR ATMega 644 chip with 64 Kbytes of ROM and 4 KBytes of RAM.
Thanks to emulation, you can try it out without the real thing, proceed here to play (note: needs a proper computer with keyboard, it won't likely work too well on phones or tablets).
You play as a dragon protagonist who must escape from his prison in an empire which wanted to break and train him to use him as a war machine in their conquests.
As such he is a powerful fire-breather who can easily storm through opposition, however the empire has a large and well equipped military all around who can grind him down if he wasn't careful. It is also important to be fast, to flee before forces could be mustered to thwart his attempt.
He doesn't want bloodshed, to be remembered as a monster, so he should be cautious to not cause more losses than necessary, and he may also help people (prisoners) on his way, supporting a probable uprising against the power.
All the pixel art, sound & music were created by me, the code is almost completely by me (I built around the Uzebox kernel, largely customizing it with lots of assembly coding including a new video engine).
For more, check out the article on my site. If you like arcane 8 bit hackery, you may also look around on the Uzebox console's site with many more interesting games for this weird platform.
The images below were part of the game's creation:
Oldschool platformer dragon, the first concept art when I didn't even know how this will look like as a game.
Pixel animation - running land dragon, refining the running animation (still not the final which ended up in the game).
Controls:
During the game:
- Dpad: Left / Right movement, looking up and down (also for firing angle)
- A, X: Jump
- B, Y: Fire
- Right Shoulder: Walk
- Left Shoulder: Look up
- Start + Select (press both): Pause (removes 100 score)
During high score entry:
- Dpad: Navigate between characters, select character
- A, X, B, Y, Shoulders: Toggle Upper / Lowercase
- Enter, Select: Accept name
In-game status displays:
From left to right, the followings are displayed:
- Dragon head: Your health. The amount of health you have contributes to your score on the end of a level.
- Fireball: Remaining fuel in your flame glands. It replenishes quickly, but you will deplete it by contiguous fire.
- Double up-arrow: Remaining energy, if it depletes, you run slow and your ability to jump is hindered. Have a rest!
- Score display: How well you are going. Usually staying alive, collecting stuff and freeing prisoners increment it and killing decrements.
- Hourglass: How long you have until you are overwhelmed and have to give up. Finishing a level faster increases your score!
Some hints in case you were stuck:
- Pay attention to your energy bar (third bar on the upper left). If it is depleted, you run slower and can't jump high. You can't catch some ledges without sufficient energy.
- Initially the dragon doesn't have his full potential. Collect power-ups, without those it might be impossible to finish the game.
- Always keep moving. Usually enemies are the least effective when you are running, but be vary of pikemen who charge at you.
This is an assembly of a few screenshots from my game (view full to see an animation), Flight of a Dragon, released for the Uzebox console, a true 8 bit hackery built around an AVR ATMega 644 chip with 64 Kbytes of ROM and 4 KBytes of RAM.
Thanks to emulation, you can try it out without the real thing, proceed here to play (note: needs a proper computer with keyboard, it won't likely work too well on phones or tablets).
You play as a dragon protagonist who must escape from his prison in an empire which wanted to break and train him to use him as a war machine in their conquests.
As such he is a powerful fire-breather who can easily storm through opposition, however the empire has a large and well equipped military all around who can grind him down if he wasn't careful. It is also important to be fast, to flee before forces could be mustered to thwart his attempt.
He doesn't want bloodshed, to be remembered as a monster, so he should be cautious to not cause more losses than necessary, and he may also help people (prisoners) on his way, supporting a probable uprising against the power.
All the pixel art, sound & music were created by me, the code is almost completely by me (I built around the Uzebox kernel, largely customizing it with lots of assembly coding including a new video engine).
For more, check out the article on my site. If you like arcane 8 bit hackery, you may also look around on the Uzebox console's site with many more interesting games for this weird platform.
The images below were part of the game's creation:
Oldschool platformer dragon, the first concept art when I didn't even know how this will look like as a game.
Pixel animation - running land dragon, refining the running animation (still not the final which ended up in the game).
Controls:
During the game:
- Dpad: Left / Right movement, looking up and down (also for firing angle)
- A, X: Jump
- B, Y: Fire
- Right Shoulder: Walk
- Left Shoulder: Look up
- Start + Select (press both): Pause (removes 100 score)
During high score entry:
- Dpad: Navigate between characters, select character
- A, X, B, Y, Shoulders: Toggle Upper / Lowercase
- Enter, Select: Accept name
In-game status displays:
From left to right, the followings are displayed:
- Dragon head: Your health. The amount of health you have contributes to your score on the end of a level.
- Fireball: Remaining fuel in your flame glands. It replenishes quickly, but you will deplete it by contiguous fire.
- Double up-arrow: Remaining energy, if it depletes, you run slow and your ability to jump is hindered. Have a rest!
- Score display: How well you are going. Usually staying alive, collecting stuff and freeing prisoners increment it and killing decrements.
- Hourglass: How long you have until you are overwhelmed and have to give up. Finishing a level faster increases your score!
Some hints in case you were stuck:
- Pay attention to your energy bar (third bar on the upper left). If it is depleted, you run slower and can't jump high. You can't catch some ledges without sufficient energy.
- Initially the dragon doesn't have his full potential. Collect power-ups, without those it might be impossible to finish the game.
- Always keep moving. Usually enemies are the least effective when you are running, but be vary of pikemen who charge at you.
Category All / All
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 618 x 448px
File Size 258.1 kB
Listed in Folders
I made it to level three before getting whisked away with other tasks. I do have to say, it would've been nice to have a interface guide; it took me a bit to figure out what each one meant, such as the jump/sprint meter. If I had known about that meter earlier, the jumps would have been less frustrating. I like how you lose the game if you leave it idle too long haha! That was a cool feature. Is there a way to pause though?
Thanks for the feedback, that's what alpha is for: Now the requested Pause feature is implemented! You can access it by Start + Select, and it will remove 100 score (that's the cost when you freeze time in a game which is meant to be played like an arcade :) ). I also added further details on the gameplay, it is on the game's GitHub README or the Uzebox Wiki page (on the latter one the Play in browser links might not yet contain the pause capability).
Wow, so someone completed it at last! Now go for a better score (hint: 20K is possible :) )!
To have it on your computer, first you could fetch an appropriate emulator from here: http://belogic.com/uzebox/downloads.htm (Use the CUzeBox version appropriate for your system). Then you can pick game ROMs (.UZE files) from the Games & Demos list here: http://uzebox.org/wiki/Games_and_Demos , including Flight of a Dragon ( http://uzebox.org/wiki/Flight_of_a_Dragon ).
Hope it works for you. The CUzeBox emulator is the same which runs in the browser, of course it is a lot faster if you put it on your computer. You can start games by dragging & dropping them onto the CUzeBox executable, or assing the .UZE extension to the emulator.
To have it on your computer, first you could fetch an appropriate emulator from here: http://belogic.com/uzebox/downloads.htm (Use the CUzeBox version appropriate for your system). Then you can pick game ROMs (.UZE files) from the Games & Demos list here: http://uzebox.org/wiki/Games_and_Demos , including Flight of a Dragon ( http://uzebox.org/wiki/Flight_of_a_Dragon ).
Hope it works for you. The CUzeBox emulator is the same which runs in the browser, of course it is a lot faster if you put it on your computer. You can start games by dragging & dropping them onto the CUzeBox executable, or assing the .UZE extension to the emulator.
Nice! :) Hope you like the idea, I mean that minimalistic game console, too! There are some fun two player games for it as well (if you have at least one game controller, you could play with a friend using the emulator too), Tank-Fu is probably the most entertaining of those (it also has a nice AI). For logic games, Laser Puzzle and 65536 in 1 could be nice choices (the latter has a quite well made Hunt the Wumpus clone).
Hey I played the game and loved it!
If you're looking for a few hotes I have a couple for you, it seems that the steam controller isn't ported fully for the game, I had to use the keyboard to jump and shoot fire instead of the posted game controls. But even with that I managed to make it to stage 2 before getting killed and needing a break. Beautiful game and very fluent :D I hope there are more story and background to the dragon trying to escape. Lore would be awesome :O
If you're looking for a few hotes I have a couple for you, it seems that the steam controller isn't ported fully for the game, I had to use the keyboard to jump and shoot fire instead of the posted game controls. But even with that I managed to make it to stage 2 before getting killed and needing a break. Beautiful game and very fluent :D I hope there are more story and background to the dragon trying to escape. Lore would be awesome :O
Huh, sorry for being this late here! (Just got home from a long trip)
For more story, keep playing! After every second level there is a bit of story, and it also has a final cutscene (keep in mind that I had 60 KBytes for all of it). For the controls where did you exactly play it? On my website, got the Uzebox emulator, or maybe on the official Uzebox web player?
For more story, keep playing! After every second level there is a bit of story, and it also has a final cutscene (keep in mind that I had 60 KBytes for all of it). For the controls where did you exactly play it? On my website, got the Uzebox emulator, or maybe on the official Uzebox web player?
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