Fitzroy and the Confounding Labyrinth

Description

The darkness is coming, and the only hope against darkness is the great artefact. Unfortunately, the great artefact was stored away for safe keeping, to prevent it falling into the wrong hands. But to make matters worse the archivists who put it away somewhere safe thought it was a good idea to build a confounding labyrinth to store the pieces of the great artefact. This is no holiday destination. Every step of the way through the labyrinth is designed to kill and leave any budding adventurer confounded. It is Fitzroy's task to recover all the pieces of the artefact, to reassemble the great artefact and repel the darkness.

Fitzroy and the Confounding Labyrinth is a top down action  game (with plenty of challenges to solve) for the Amstrad CPC and is a 2022 entry for the CPCRetroDev game competition.

The game has been developed using the amazing CPCtelera game library.

How to Play

Default controls are as follows (or rebind them to your own preference)

• Left: Move the player left.
• Right: Move the player right.
• Up: Move the player upward.
• Down: Move the player downward.
  
• X: (Action) Use an interactive object or shoot the bow or drop a block being carried.

Shouldn't be too hard but watch out for anything that can kill you. Whether it moves or not it is probably out to get you.

Actions

There are several different player actions that have been combined into a single control (this allows for a single button joystick).

The combined actions are:

• Use
• Shoot
• Drop block

If Fitzroy is in on top of an interactive object, then the interactive object will be activated. 

If Fitzroy is carrying a block, he will drop the block (if there is a clear space for it in front of him). 

Otherwise, Fitzroy will fire the bow (assuming Fitzroy has picked it up and has sufficient ammo). 

Blocks

The game includes a droppable block mechanic, this is a block that Fitzroy can carry and drop in the level. Fitzroy cannot shoot or activate an interactive object while carrying a block. He can also only carry a single block at a time.

Move onto the block to pick it up.

 

When you are carrying a block the hud will display a block.

In order to drop a block there must be an empty space (or something that you are allowed to drop the block onto) in front of Fitzroy. The block will be dropped in front of the direction that Fitzroy is facing but slightly to the left.

  

Everything else

If you need any more information or hints look at the user manual, you might be the first person to actually read it!

Authors and Licenses

This game has been developed by:

• Adrian Parker (awergh) - Everything but music

Additional help has returned this year:

• Eric Love - Music and testing

The game source code has been released under an MIT License.

The game was developed with the help of the following software:

• CPCTelera 1.5 (dev) (ronaldo / (Cheesetea, Fremos, ByteRealms)) - Tool chain and libraries building the game for the Amstrad CPC.
• Retro Game Asset Studio (lachlank) - For game graphics
• Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Microsoft Visual Studio - Text Editor and Integrated Development Environment.
• Arkos Tracker 2 - Sound and Music
• Arkos Tracker 2 with CPCtelera - Arnaud provided assistance and helpful source files for integrating CPCtelera with Arkos Tracker 2.
• WinAPE (Richard Wilson) - To run the game I used WinAPE 2.0 Beta 2 and my Amstrad CPC 464.
• CPCEC (cngsoft - Cesar Nicolas-Gonzalez) - I also used CPCEC for my testing as an alternate emulator and it had a closer matching green to my GT64 than WinAPE.
• WinCPCTelera (Arnaud) - In order to leverage the Microsoft Visual Studio Debugger I used WinCPCTelera by Arnaud
• Allegro 5.2.8 - As part of my development process I created a map editor using Allegro for creating levels.
• Azure DevOps - Every project needs source control, task tracking and continuous integration.

Gesture

Fitzroy and the Confounding Labyrinth includes a gesture for Larcena's Legacy in two ways. It includes two items that are inspired from graphics in the game.

Several of the characters in Larcena's Legacy were wearing glasses. I have added glasses as a special item to collect and use in the game.

Secondly I have added a coin to each level that is particularly tricky to collect but will give you extra points if you collect them all. 

Install Instructions

On a real Amstrad CPC:

Loading from disk: 

• Type Run”Game and press Enter 

Loading from tape: 

• Press CTRL and the Small ENTER key, then press Play.

Using an emulator:

You can play the game using any Amstrad CPC emulator (WinAPE, CPCEC, RetroVirtualMachine). 

Load the game file into the emulator, then type RUN" and press ENTER.