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C O N T E N T S
I. Introduction
II. The original
III. How to play
IV. About the remake
V. Conclusion
APPENDIX
A. Compiling the source
B. Disclaimer
__________________________
I. I N T R O D U C T I O N
This file is accompanying our entry "Sword of Fargoal" to the remakes.org
competition in summer 2003. The only important part of this file is
chapter III, which has some information you might find useful when
actually playing our remake, and the appendix, in case your operating
system is not Windows and you want to compile the sources yourself.
___________________________
II. T H E O R I G I N A L
Former owners of a C64 certainly will remember Sword of Fargoal. It was
created by Jeff McCord and released for the C64 by Epyx in 1983. It is a
simple rogue-like game (preceding the first official release of Rogue
though). And according to http://www.cdaccess.com/html/pc/150best.htm,
it is one of the best 150 games ever. A summary of its description could
read like this:
You are on a quest to retrieve the Sword of Fargoal, which lies between
levels 15 and 20 of a dungeon. The dungeon levels are populated by an
ever-regrowing number of different monsters, the deeper the dungeon level,
the stronger the monsters. By retrieving experience points and collecting
treasures, your own strength will increase as well, while finding your way
down through randomly generated dungeons. With the help of different items
and all sorts of spells, and by escaping various kinds of traps, you
finally can find the Sword of Fargoal in the middle of a labyrinth - which
doesn't mean your done, no way, now the game only really begins. A timer
is started, and you have to get back up to the dungeon entrance again
before time runs out. This isn't as easy as it sounds, because dungeon
levels are newly created and look different every time you climb up or
down, and are now full of monsters waiting to steal the sword from you -
in which case you have to climb down and find it again - but the timer
isn't reset.
For more informations and the complete story, visits these sites:
http://home.arcor.de/cybergoth/epyx/swordoffargoal.html
http://fargoal.home.comcast.net/
__________________________
III. H O W T O P L A Y
1. The menu
Should be pretty self-explanatory. When you run the game, you end up in
the main menu. From there you can either start a new quest, continue the
current quest (if there is one), and continue or delete a previous quest,
selecting out of 9 different quest-slots. You can also change the used
display color depth (only recommended in case you encounter diaplay
problems), switch between windowed and fullscreen display, choose
different graphics sets, and tweak how faithful the original game is
emulated. Oh, and of course there is an option to leave the game again.
You can get back to the menu from the game by pressing the Esc key.
2. Controls
Now, once you are in the dungeon, use the cursor keys to move around, and
the control keys or space for various actions, like climbing up or down
stairs, or trying to escape a trap. Additionally, you can use the keys
listed below to cast spells and do some other things:
Cursors/Joystick Move
Control/Space/ Action (Climb/Escape/Teleport..) or Pass
Joystick Button
H Drink healing potion
B Place a beacon
G Hide your gold
T Teleport spell
S Shield spell
D Drift spell
R Regeneration spell
I Invisibility spell
L Light spell
O Switch light spell on and off
Esc Menu (Save/Load/Quit..)
3. Monsters and Fighting
Often, you won't be able to avoid confrontation with some of the various
monsters. In such a case, you will hopefully be the stronger, and slay
your opponent, probably after a short battle. The key to winning battles
is having enough hitpoints, and enough battle skill. The former can be
increased by gaining levels, the latter by winning fights and finding
items. Levels are gained by collecting enough experience points, which in
turn are obtained from winning battles, or by offering gold to the gods.
Keep in mind that you can only escape from a battle if you are the
attacker, and also be aware that monsters are of different strength.
Generally, creatures are weaker than humans, and include, starting with
the weaker ones: Direwolf, Ogre, Hobgoblin, Werebear, Gargoyle, Troll,
Wyvern, Dimension spider, Shadow dragon and Fyre Drake. Humans include:
Rogue, Barbarian, Elvin ranger, Dwarfen guard, Mercenary, Swordsman, Monk,
Dark warrior, Assassin, and Warlord. Also be careful about the special
abilities of some of them: Assassins are invisible, and Dimension spiders
can teleport. And many of them will try to steal your gold, of if you have
it, the Sword of Fargoal - and sometimes even use magic to steal your
experience points or your spells.
4. Items and places
Generally, if you step somewhere, you also will do actions like picking
something up or opening it. If you don't want this, hold the action key
when stepping somewhere, and you will just pass over whatever is there.
Regularly you will encounter lost treasures along your way - but be
careful, although they can contain useful goods, they can also be traps:
They might just explode, open a pit below you, make the ceiling crush on
you, or simply teleport you away. In return, the good items they contain
are: Magical spells, maps to deeper dungeon levels, beacons, healing
potions and magical sacks.
Staircases and pits can be used to change to different dungeon levels. All
spells in effect will stop, and the dungeon level will look differently
when you come back. (For the reason why, read the story of the original:
In short, it's a magical dungeon.)
Gold can only be used to sacrifice at temples, and is important for
leveling up. Every magical sack lets you carry 100 gold pieces more.
Temples are where you can use your gold: Offer it to the gods (there's
nothing to buy for it in the dungeons anyway). In temples, you are also
safe from monster attacks, and heal at the double rate. With our extended
balancing, sacrificing gold also causes the gods to bless you and restore
your complete health every 2000 gold pieces.
A very important item are healing potions. They do what you would expect,
they give you some extra health. They are automatically used when needed,
or you can press H to drink them. Be aware that they won't save you from
deadly hits (your hitpoints get smaller than -5).
Beacons can be placed in a map, and will make you invisible to monsters.
And by using the action key, you can teleport to the temple, without
needing a teleport spell.
5. Spells
The Teleport spell teleports you to the beacon, if there is one, else to a
random position. It can be used to escape a fight started by a monster, or
to escape from a crushing ceiling (Hit the action key while the ceiling is
falling).
The regeneration spell doubles the rate at which you are healing. Safe
some of them for later, when you will have many hitpoints and healing will
take a long time otherwise. They also accumulate their effects inside
temples, and you can cast them multiple times (to heal 4x, 8x, ...
faster).
The shield spell makes you invulnerable during the next fight, and also
saves you from explosion traps.
The drift spell makes you fall slowly, saving you from damage in pit traps
(Hit the action key to activate the spell while falling).
The invisibility spell makes you invisible to monsters. But don't deem
yourself invulnerable while invisible - monsters still might stumble upon
you. Also be aware that an active light spell makes you visible again.
The light spell increases the dungeon area you discover with each step,
and also reveals hidden assassins. It can be turned on and off with the O
key.
___________________________________
IV. A B O U T T H E R E M A K E
As anyone remembering the original game will have noticed, our main focus
in the creation of this remake was to be as faithful to the original
gameplay as possible. Naturally, we feature all the monsters, behaviors,
items, spells, actions and events from the original game, down to the
exact same text messages. We also took special care to reconstruct the
original timing, and imitated the same hybrid of turn-based/action
movement, where everything is paused during e.g. message display or
monster movement, but at the same time the game continues when the player
does nothing. The part we probably spent the most time with was getting
the monster and player balancing right, spending several nights dissecting
the original's C64 code (half Basic with 2 letter variables, half Asm). It
should work 100% the same now - if you don't believe it, look at our
source code which is annotated with code from the original all over the
place. The same applies to the random level generation, which produces
100% authentic levels.
Note however, that we also added some optional small changes, which are
enabled by default, but can be adjusted in the menu (enhanced balancing of
battle skill, enhanced behavior of characters with special attributes,
enhanced movement timing, original controls, original fighting, original
dungeons, original speed). The gameplay is improved by all the changes in
our opinion, but you can enable/disable them, or some of them.
We also made one change to the original keys: B is used for beacons
instead of +, because the + key needs a key combination on non-English
keyboards, and G is used to bury gold instead.
And of course, we tried to improve on the graphics a bit - while trying to
stay as faithful to the original artwork as possible even here. Tiles got
walls, and the monsters include more detail. And you can choose to play
with the original tiles if you want. (As well as other graphics sets.)
Some amount of work also was put in the sounds: They are all synthesized
by us, based on the original game.
Oh, and for the sake of everyone actually trying to finish the game, the
current quest is saved when exiting, so you have plenty of time to finish
it - else you might end up like the author of the site below, let me quote
from it:
"...That put a serious dent into the mystique, but we still loved the
games, even as we discovered that there was no prize for completing
Enchanter. Zork I had no graphics at the end. Zork III really could be
solved. (Nobody ever did find that damn Sword of Fargoal and make it out
of the dungeon.)..."
http://www.justadventure.com/articles/Best_Ending/Ending.shtm
______________________
V. C O N C L U S I O N
This game for sure is the most faithful remake of Sword of Fargoal you can
find. (Probably our other remake of it, which was done for an 48h contest
at rpgdx.net, is the only other one. And that one isn't faithful at all,
has incomplete gameplay, and is not even finished.) Our remakes.org remake
on the other hand must be one of the most faithful remakes in general -
long parts of the code read like a "manual C64 emulator", having a comment
with C64 basic, then some code, then again a C64 comment, then some code..
Just so we could make sure not to miss a single feature of the original.
_______________
A P P E N D I X
__________________________________________
A. C O M P I L I N G T H E S O U R C E
Besides Windows, Sword of Fargoal will also work on many Unix platforms
(including Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris and Darwin), MacOS X, QNX, BeOS
and DOS - but we cannot provide binaries for all of them. Therefore, you
have to compile the sources yourself.
To compile the source code, you must have the Allegro library installed.
It is available from http://alleg.sf.net. Both the stable and unstable
versions, 4.0.x and 4.1.x, should work (development was done with 4.0.3).
For example, if case you have a Debian Linux system, getting Allegro is a
matter of executing:
apt-get install liballegro-dev
Most other binary Linux distributions will have a similar way to acquire
the necessary allegro development files. In other cases, you have to
compile Allegro yourself. To do so - simply get the Allegro package from
the site mentioned above, and follow the instructions contained inside it.
In Linux, once Allegro is installed, change into the src directory of the
Sword of Fargoal package, and run make:
cd src
make
On other platforms, where make does not work, you have to know how to
compile a C program and link it to an executable. In this case, simply
compile all the .c files in the src directory, and link them against the
Allegro library. It could look like this:
cd src
gcc *.c -lalleg
But may be different for some compilers and platforms.
If you have any problems compiling, and are sure Allegro is installed
correctly (i.e. you can compile other Allegro programs), you can write to
elias@users.sf.net and ask for help.
In linux, after you have compiled it, run the game by typing:
./sword
Have fun!
Elias Pschernig and Paul Pridham
elias@users.sf.net ppridham@users.sf.net
______________________
B. D I S C L A I M E R
The original game we copied in this remake, as well as some of the
resources we used from the original, are owned by their respective
creators.
#include
"I do not accept responsibility for any effects, adverse or otherwise,
that this application may have on you, your computer, your sanity, your
dog, and anything else that you can think of. Use it at your own risk."