Trap Runner (2018)

Trap Runner is a classical horizontally scrolling Jump and Run. It was the second game of Night OWL Design after Solid Gold and has been developed in cooperation with Retroguru (support and beta testing). The physical release was distributed by APC&TCP. It takes advantage of the experience gained from developing the latest Retroguru Sqrxz games and adds some new techniques (for example optimised background restoration). Its development started for real around February 2018 and the first version was shown in September at the Function 2018 in Budapest where it reached the second place in the game development category.

It features 5 worlds with different graphics and four stages in each, always completed by a bonus level. So there are 25 levels, followed by a special boss fight in level 26. Additionally there are few extra levels you can warp to, like jetpack-flying levels.

The game is designed to be always fair, but you have to be alert all the time to evade all of the traps, obstacles and monsters. Besides the genre-typical jumping and running you can duck to evade flying monsters and use magic in later levels, after collecting potions, which enables you to fill transparent ghost tiles with colour, to make them solid. There are also magical pills to collect, which make you change your own colour and render tiles with the same colour passable. Collect lots of other items to increase your score, gain extra lives or fulfil one of the special level missions (like: collect all four puzzle tiles in a level to open the exit). Two of the four levels in a world have a mission. The other two are free runs - just reach the exit.

List of features

  • Runs on any classic Amiga. Minimun requirements: 512K Chip-RAM and 1 MB total.
  • Written in 100% 68000 assembler.
  • 50fps, soft parallax scrolling, more than 50 colours.
  • Handdrawn pixels.
  • More than 25 soundtracks and about the same number of different sound effects.
  • Options menu with joypad-button configuration, ECS-borderblank, sound-check, etc.
  • Passwords for each level.
  • Writable options and high score table.
  • Intro and outro story.
  • Comes as fully packed disk (Doynamite compressed) with trackloader.

Development tools used

  • vasmm68k cross assembler
  • any C compiler (for the tools, not for the game)
  • TilEd map editor
  • Renoise and Milkytracker for music
  • Gimp for graphics

Credits

  • Programming: Frank Wille
  • Original concept, graphics, music, level design: Gerrit Wille
  • Beta testing: Denny Müller (Retroguru)
  • Doynamite LZ packer: Johan Forslöf
  • Support and PR: Shahzad Sahaib (Retroguru)