• STAR QUEST
  

Project Status

• Inspired by Action Adventures as well as fast-paced fantasy shooters like Heretic/Hexen.
• StarQuest is a top-down action dungeon crawler for the Vectrex. You play as a wizard navigating a dungeon made up of levels connected by portals, fighting enemies, collecting keys and powerups and unlocking new paths towards a final battle.
• The most notable feature is a sequence-based spellcasting system, giving the player a huge toolkit of tactical options. The current spellbook includes a lightning bolt, dragon's breath, area repel, decoy, slow, freeze and two types of teleport. The design intent is that each spell is genuninely useful in different situations, so players can develop their own approach rather than spamming a basic projectile over and over.
• The control scheme is also a deliberate departure from the rotation and thrust scheme found in many classic Vectrex titles, instead allowing for instantaneous movement in any direction using the analog joystick.
• The dungeon features several enemy types with distinct behaviors: chasers, snipers that can only be hit during certain frames of their animation, chargers, teleporting enemies launching homing projectiles, berserkers that become more dangerous as they take hits and rotating blade constructs.
  Many portals require keys to unlock, which can be found around other levels or dropped by enemies, rewarding exploration. Boss encounters are planned.

• Move the Hero by pushing the joystick in the desired direction of movement.
• Pressing button 1 locks the aim direction and begins casting a spell.
• When in spellcasting mode enter a sequence of inputs using buttons 2,3 and 4 (referred to as A, B and C until more appropriately wizardly names are found), followed by pressing button 1 again to launch the spell.
• The current spellbook is:
• Simple Projectile - A
• Lighting Bolt - A A
• Dragon's Breath - A B
• Magic Missile - A C
• Random Teleport - B
• Dash - B B
• Decoy - B A
• Slow - C
• Freeze - C C
• Repel - C B
• Preliminary manual: star_quest.pdf
  

• The game is built on a custom engine designed for maximum flexibility, extendability and scalability. Levels define their own memory maps, allowing for all levels to reuse the same block of RAM regardless of the enemies they contain or the behavior they implement.
• Entites implement a standardized interface using vtables which allows for a unified level loop and complex interaction between entities and spell effects.

• Ponybius