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[ilmenit]

The game

"His Dark Majesty" is a story-driven turn-based strategy game that takes the core elements of Advance Wars and The Battle for Wesnoth. The game is free to download.

The features

• Single player campaign with interesting story in 23 chapters.
• Challenging and fast artifical intelligence.
• 26 different units with unique features and abilities, including flying units, water units, mages and beasts.
• 10 characters that help you or challenge you during the game.
• Graphics, music and sound effects by the best 8bit artists.
• Intro and outro scenes.
• Intuitive user interface.
• In-game hint system that teaches you how to play.
• Works on a 8-bit Atari computer which has 64KB of memory and 1.77 MHz CPU!

   
The story

"The world hath never been a safe and silent place, however its perils were familiar and well known. The Dark Army that descended upon the land one disastrous decade ago brought with it chaos and pain, and made of these simple worries only a memory. An eternity of dread and affliction became a certainty for the high-born and peasant alike. The virtuous king of the land hath been executed and his son left to rot in a prison cell. Memories of his life as the Prince of the land have faded away like mist, and only half-remembered visions, clutched tightly to his breast, of the sun upon an open field, or the smile on a maiden's face armor his soul from complete madness. It seemed that all hope had been relinquished..."




The website
http://hdm.atari.pl

The game is written in C and the presentation layer is platform independent. Therefore it can be easily ported to any platform (mobile phones maybe?).

Any comments are welcome

[moi]

This is awesome beyond words

[handCraftedRadio]

Yes, it looks really awesome, but I haven't had any luck getting it to work with the Altirra emulator. It seems to start up fine, but when I get to the menu and select new game, it goes to what I am assuming is a loading screen which has a progress bar at the bottom and just hangs there forever. I tried it 3 times and the bar stops at different lengths each time.

The opening seems to work fine. The graphics and music are awesome so far. I hope I can get this to work. 

[moi]

It becomes a bit slow at times (but thanks to emulator you can speed up) and is there a way to save?

It works very well with atari800Win

[deathtotheweird]

You can save your state by going to the File menu or by pressing Alt+Z to save and Alt+L to load.

So far this game is fantastic. Having a blast playing it. Kind of annoying trying to set up the emulator at first, but it was worth the effort.

[muku]

This looks great. Might have to try it, though the hassle of setting up an Atari emulator puts me off a bit. If you presentation layer is platform independent, shouldn't it be easy to compile a native Windows version using SDL? That would greatly expand your audience, I believe.

[The Monster King]

i'm getting a really strong Langrisser (Warsong on genesis) vibe from this and it is a very good thing

[Triplefox]

*Atari fanboyism, squee*

This is one of the most polished efforts I've seen for the Atari. My views are a bit colored by only ever really experiencing the early 80's arcade ports, not the later Polish stuff But it shows attention to detail, the music is rad, the graphics pretty decent(for a turn-based strategy game at least), and I'm having fun. Hard to beat that!

[davidfrankel]

Looks awesome.  I'd love to see an iPhone port...

[ChevyRay]

Port it to iPhone and you've sold 1 copy guaranteed (yeah iPhone blows as a platform, but it's the only mobile one I have)! This looks fantastic. I'll hook up and emulator and give it a run in a bit here, because this sounds too good to pass up.

[deathtotheweird]

If you do port it, give the user a button to speed up turns. In bigger battles the enemy or AI take forever. Thankfully the emulator can speed that up.

[moi]

How hard was it working with the Atari graphic limitations?
this computer seems a bit complex on the graphic side, if I understand correctly you're allowed 6 colours per line or sthg like that.

[deathtotheweird]

I'm getting clobbered on the part where you have to defend the village. Tried just about every thing, any hints?



I surround them with my swordsmen when they enter the village from the west, and have my archers shoot at them while they are dealing with the swordsmen. Then they just shoot back at me and use their ballista and archers and rape me. Tried about 8 times and still can't beat it.

[ilmenit]

Port it to iPhone and you've sold 1 copy guaranteed

I do not know anything about Iphone programming and I do not own any Mac to work on :/
Is there anyone willing to help?

How hard was it working with the Atari graphic limitations?
this computer seems a bit complex on the graphic side, if I understand correctly you're allowed 6 colours per line or sthg like that.

It was hard indeed to make a clear and nice looking graphics on Atari. The game uses mode that allows 5 colours per line + a few sprites. The sprites are used for the cursor, highlighting and animation effects. The biggest limitation was the memory - I wanted to make the game working on a basic 64KB machine.

If you do port it, give the user a button to speed up turns. In bigger battles the enemy or AI take forever. Thankfully the emulator can speed that up.

In case of port I would have to slow the game down
Atari has 1.77 MHz CPU - IPhone ARM class CPU is at least 300 times faster.

I'm getting clobbered on the part where you have to defend the village. Tried just about every thing, any hints?

Do not allow the enemy to enter the village. Block the enterance with your shieldmen and replace them with swordsmen when wounded. Focus the crossbowmen and archers power on the enemy trebuchet (the most deadly enemy unit in this battle). Spread your units that are in range of the trebuchet (explosive attack does 5 hits on a cross). Use your ballista to weaken attackers. The cavalry can be used as a bait to take away some enemy forces or could try to reach the trebuchet. Do not allow any enemy unit to enter a house.

[Triplefox]

I'm getting clobbered on the part where you have to defend the village. Tried just about every thing, any hints?

I'm stuck here too, it's much harder than the previous levels. The best tactic I've found so far is to trick the AI into thinking they can charge with melee at the front by moving one unit out a little bit aggressively, and then fall back to form a one square opening which is surrounded by the swordsman and shieldman. If you stay static they will use ranged units to kill all of those guys instead.

Edit: of course right after posting I beat it. It really is all about dancing around so that the AI is in the "wrong place" all the time.

[deathtotheweird]

Yeah right after I read his post I played it once more and beat it. The best trick is to destroy their trebuchet's as fast as possible and keep your men on the houses.

I love the brutal difficulty of this game. Once you start losing, you know you've fucked up. Which is why I'm glad he put in the surrender button. Of course I'm stuck on the next part after, but instead of asking for help I'm going to try and think it myself. beaten, with 6 turns left! feels good man.

[ilmenit]

So, did anyone win the game?

What do you think about the difficulty? Some people say that the game is too easy, some have problems even on the second level, which is basically a tutorial level...

[deathtotheweird]

I'm at the circle of power right now. The big battle before that was actually kinda easy compared to the rest of the game.

I think the game is pretty difficult but not too difficult. I like these types of games but I was never good at them, and I didn't play many. I got pretty frustrated on the defending village part earlier and also the part where you get ambushed at the tavern. The latter I beat in about 5 tries and the former way too many count. I dunno why but that level was just super hard to me. I enjoyed the difficulty of everything else so far.

[h_double]

This is phenomenal. Great use of the Atari's graphics capabilities, great gameplay, great soundtrack.

Really my only issue with it is using the one button for undo/end turn is a little fiddly, and I've already lost one map because of an accidental end turn -- I wonder if it might be more manageable if there were an end turn icon at the bottom menu? But I figure that's something that I'll get used to with a little practice, and don't mind sucking it up and looking at it as a challenge to play more carefully. Also the screen scrolling is a little weird, it threw me off for a bit at first because it doesn't scroll an entire screen width, but once I oriented to it, it was fine.

[ilmenit]

I have tried a different control schemes. The current one, with holding the fire button to end turn, is faster and more handy than moving the cursor to an icon. Unfortunately Atari joysticks had just a one fire button...

I did a Windows installer that configures an emulator for you
It should make the gaming experience easier.

[EDIT]
The new version of the installer on the website simplifies the installation process.
You don't have to configure the emulator anymore because the installer does it for you. Simply install the game, run it and play!