Design Design Design

Posted by oddbob on September 5, 2008 · Lovingly Filed Under Articles, Featured 
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I’ve mentioned an awful lot of times recently my love for the more simplistic vector approach to graphics, clean lines and high speed gaming is something I utterly adore. When I were a lad and the humble Speccy were in its prime (enough of that - Ed) there was a pair of companies that were responsible for me developing this love.

Whilst I’m sure a lot of people got hooked on the vector look courtesy of Battlezone or Star Wars, this wasn’t for me. For a start, there wasn’t really that much in the way of arcade action to be had in a crumbling industrial town with unemployment on the rise. There was only really the one leisure centre in the town anyway and that had Scramble. We did have an arcade, I might add, but it was more the kind of place parents warn you away from than encourage you to dive inside.

For me it was the games of Realtime Games and Design Design that got me hooked on vector graphics. Now, Realtime’s 3d Tank Duel I still claim is the most impressive home port of Battlezone that existed during the eighties but Design Design? I’ve just realised that I don’t think I’ve mentioned the beauty that is Simon Brattel’s Dark Star on this blog before which is quite forgetful and unforgivable of me. The sheer speed of the fucking thing at the time was (well, I guess still is) fucking amazing. No, don’t just listen to me here - have a go yourself. (I’d normally do a WoS link, but I can’t get the site to load right now so have something a bit more competitive).

One of the truly wonderful things about Dark Star (aside from just being plain phenomenal) was the amount of control over the game Simon Brattel built into it. As much as is possible is user configurable. You have 4 game variants, 6 difficulty levels ranging from easy to “pretty damn devastating”, you can configure the brutality and frequency of the enemy missiles all the way from none to (again) “pretty damn devastating”, varying levels of sound effects and even have different display modes. It also features a wonderful high score table and one of my favourite sets of instructions ever:

Fly around the universe. If it moves shoot it. If it doesn’t, shoot it anyway. If it’s square - fly through it.

Utterly fantastic. Even if the tunnels were cunts.

Anyway, the purpose of this post isn’t just to eulogise over how fantastic Dark Star, Design Design and the work of Simon Brattel is/was (although that is something more people should mention, honourable props to the Good Reverend Mr Campbell for his YS Top 100 write up many moons ago) but to also mention that Mr Brattel has now dug out a ruck of his old source code for the games and put them online. Which is awesome.

Also, have some related links:

Design Design Source Code
Crash Interview
Noddy’s Guide To Game Design

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Speak your brains

2 Responses to “Design Design Design”

  1. Simon Brattel on September 5th, 2008 10:56 pm

    Ancient history now, but I much preferred Tank Busters (Amstrad) to Dark Star… Pity I never had the enthusiasm to write a Spectrum version…

    Realtime’s stuff was just too slow for my tastes. Same for Rommel’s Revenge.

  2. oddbob on September 6th, 2008 7:16 am

    I was too poor to afford a CPC, although I used to duck round a mates house to see what he had for his. Always more interested in big exploration games than I was though, so I spent more time gawping at him trying to complete whatever big adventure he was on at the time.

    I’m quite fond of Realtime’s stuff, it’s Argonaut that griped me. Could never get on with those at all. They always felt technically impressive but cumbersome and awkward to play.

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