Dark Castle Blog "WEEKLY!?? Update (9/3/10)

Welcome back, dear readers, I am guessing you didn't expect to hear from me again so soon. Well, this week, we will be chatting with someone from Super Happy Fun Fun, Bill LaCoste, the producer of Return to Dark Castle.

Jon God: Can you tell me when you first got involved with Return to Dark Castle?

Bill LaCoste: I got involved with Dark Castle way back in April of 2008.

Jon God: Had you ever heard of, or played any of the original games before then?

Bill LaCoste: I had heard of Dark Castle before then, but never played it. My last Apple computer was an Apple IIe, which I had when I was in middle school and high school. After that it was straight PC gaming for me. I certainly loved it when I had it and was excited about games like Karateka, Wasteland, Haunted House, and many other text adventures. But that's not DC related, so feel free to do what you want with that info.

Jon God: What is interesting having worked on cell phone games up till then, suddenly working on a computer game?

Bill LaCoste: Well, my career spans farther back than that. I began my career in 92 working at Origin on PC games and some Mac ones, then moved over to Iguana in 95 working on consoles, and then finally over to SHFF in late 2005 to work in mobile. To me, it was just another product on a different platform and I was perfectly comfortable in getting it developed and out to the market.

Jon God: Is there anything specifically you had to do differently with this game over any previous games?

Bill LaCoste: In relation to my previous PC/Mac experience, no. I took the same approach in looking at the available operating systems, their specs, and made sure that we covered a good range of operating systems, graphics cards, and input devices. As you know, though, it's impossible to catch every single combination, so we do what we can and work with the developers to fix issues when they arise.

Jon God: What is Super Happy Fun Fun's decision, as to when the Level Editor will be released?

Bill LaCoste: Right now, it's on hold until all of the issues and have been addressed. We realize this has been an ongoing issue and that people are excited about seeing it, but with a product like this it's very important that the UI is solid and informative, and that the game is not adversely effected by the creation of new levels. I also should mention that both SHFF and Z-Sculpt have had limited and resources to make this happen. I certainly hope that we'll be able to make this happen soon.

Jon God: What is your opinion on porting Return to Dark Castle to other platforms, such as the Playstation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Playstation Portable, or Nintendo DS?

Bill LaCoste: I think in some ways, it would be a welcome product on the PSP and the DS, but a lot of design and prototype work would need to be done at the beginning, because you have to design for the device. The challenge is doing that and maintaining the same unique, challenging, and classic gameplay that the game is known for.

Jon God: Have you ever visited the Dark Castle Forums?

Bill LaCoste: Yes, many times. I think it's important that we see feedback from our customers who have been so loyal to the product for many years.

Jon God: Will there ever be a chance, for those who missed it, to play Dark Castle Mobile (The original cell phone Dark Castle by Super Happy Fun Fun)?

Bill LaCoste: Not unless you have one of those really old phones. For mobile devices, I feel the right way to go is forward with a new story/product built for modern devices.

Jon God: Did you request any large changes to Return to Dark Castle after becoming the publisher?

Bill LaCoste: Nothing major because I understood the game and the market we were going after. Most of the changes were just aesthetic and under the hood.

Jon God: What made you suddenly go with a new type of DRM near the release of the game?

Bill LaCoste: DRM is always a nasty subject. A lot of customers hate it, but it's sometimes necessary for developers and publishers to implement a system so that the end user has to make a conscious decision of whether or not to steal the product or buy the product. It's that simple. Many people on forums will argue that it can be cracked easily, and I truly understand that, but we need that line to protect the product. The developers work VERY hard on these products and deserve to be paid for that work. The original DC titles had well over 1 million people play the game, but only a fraction of those people actually purchased it. I think that's sad and there's a lot of hypocrisy there.

Jon God: What is Mark Steven Pierce like as a (boss)Co-Worker?

Bill LaCoste: I enjoy working with Mark. I think he's passionate about making games, has a long history of successful titles, and cares about the people he works with.

Jon God: Have you thought of sequels, or expansion packs to Return to Dark Castle?

Bill LaCoste: Absolutely. I think the product has a great community, following, and history. I would like to see it move forward as a whole, though. Advancements in graphics, technology, and gameplay, while still remaining true to the original titles. I think that can be done and we'll see what the future holds for DC.

Jon God: Have you thought of rereleasing the original Dark Castle titles at some point?

Bill LaCoste: I think there has been some discussion here and there, but nothing in stone. The focus for Z-Sculpt has been on RtDC.

Jon God: What are the chances for a open, or closed beta for the level editor?

Bill LaCoste: Those chances are high, I just don't know when. I know a lot of people would like to help out with this and it would give us a much better chance of catching bugs and improving the editor before final release. Beta testing with the community has been discussed and I'm 100% in favor of it.

Jon God: Alright, thank you for your time, and work on Return to Dark Castle.

Bill LaCoste: No problem, my pleasure.

PUZZLE & ANSWER:

Each week, I hope to have a puzzle for you to solve, which will somehow relate to Dark Castle. This week's puzzle is in the form of a description without the word it belongs to, relating to castles.

Description: I am a tiny cell where prisoners were left to die.


Answer for last "week's" puzzle: Bailey


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Feel free to send in feedback, what you did/didn't like, what you'd like to see, ect, as I would love to hear it.

Dark Castle Blog "WEEKLY!?" update

Dear readers, it's been a while. Today I have a special treat for you though.

Joe Williams, CEO of Delta Tao, one of the people that made the remake to the original Dark Castle, Color Dark Castle, in 1994.

Jon God: Hey you got a moment?

Joe Williams: Sure. What's up?

Jon God: I was curious on some dark castle history, if you have the time for a few questions.

Joe Williams: Sure. I'm not the biggest expert, but I'm game.

Jon God: What made you originally want to port Dark Castle to Color?

Joe Williams: We just thought it was a great game, and it was a shame to see it go out of print. And black and white games weren't marketable in 1992 any more.

Jon God: In the manual to Color Dark Castle, you said that Color Beyond Dark Castle was planned. Did it ever get beyond planning?

Joe Williams: Nope. Sales for CDC were disappointing, and it was more work than we expected. Return to Dark Castle includes all the BDC levels, though we gave it back to Mark before it was done.

Jon God: Any figure you can cite for the sales?

Joe Williams: I'd just be guessing. Maybe 10,000?

Jon God: The manual lists Howard Vives as credited to the artwork for Color Dark Castle, was he a part of Delta Tao or was he brought in to help?

Joe Williams: He was an employee. Our main artist for all our games.

Jon God: What made you go with different intro/main menu screens?

Joe Williams: Were they different? My memory has them nearly the same. We worked pretty hard to be true to the original.

Jon God: Dark Castle, Color Dark Castle, Main Menus.

Joe Williams: I just let Howard go nuts on those, and do what he wanted.

Jon God: Who's idea was it to include the new Secret Level?

Joe Williams: Timmer's.

Jon God: Was there a conscious decision on turning the Water from Fireball 2 and Fireball 3 into lava?

Joe Williams: Yeah -- it seemed more dangerous that way.

Jon God: In Color Dark Castle it was added that you could hit command Q to return to the great hall. This made it easy to skip the dungeon. It also could be used to avoid losing lives, was that something done on purpose?

Joe Williams: Yeah, I guess so. The whole "limited number of lives" thing was kind of dated by then.

Jon God: Was there any other extras added to Color Dark Castle besides the Secret Level? There were rumors of another date easter egg.

Joe Williams: Not that I remember, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Jon God: What convinced you to let the relatively new software company Z Sculpt start working on a Dark Castle Sequel?

Joe Williams: We weren't doing anything with it, and they seemed pretty fanatical.

Jon God: How much involvement did you have with the development of Return to Dark Castle?

Joe Williams: I was pretty involved in the early days, but we pretty much canceled the project years before it released. Zack got married, and the project fell impossibly behind schedule. I'm glad it did eventually get released.

Jon God: What do you think about Return to Dark Castle, now that it has finally been released? Did you play it?

Joe Williams: A bit. It was way too hard for me. I've got old-guy slow fingers.

Jon God: How much did the rights to Dark Castle cost originally?

Joe Williams: No cash. Aldus had bought Silicon Beach for its graphics stuff, and didn't want to be in the games business. We swapped them some graphics technology we had developed for Zeus. It may have eventually found its way into Photoshop when Adobe bought them.

Jon God: Small world. Dick Noel, who is he? In the Color Dark Castle manual, it says he voiced Fred Flintstone, but I've not been able to find out if it's true, or what. I asked Jonathan Gay, the original programer to Dark Castle, and Beyond Dark Castle, but he wasn't fully sure either.

Joe Williams: Yeah, I've never been able to validate it, either. He's in the credits, and that was in the notes, but I don't know the details.

Jon God: It was a shame, I always wished there'd be a Beyond Dark Castle Color, I thought you guys did a great job on Color Dark Castle. I made this at one point, not sure if I ever E-Mailed it to you.

Joe Williams: Did you like RTDC?

Jon God: I did indeed. Though, each game in the series has been a bit different than the previous in style. The first was mostly an arcade game, high scores, lives, ect. Beyond Dark Castle was more adventure-y, but still contained lives and high scores. RTDC is a straight up adventure game. I also would have loved to see Delta Tao's touch on BDC.

Joe Williams: My take on it would've been even more adventure-y.

Jon God: Aye, Color Dark Castle was more adventure-y than the original.

Joe Williams: Was it? I don't remember changing that much.

Jon God: It had a saving system, and when you beat the game on advanced it scrolled credits, making you unable to continue playing indefinitely until you ran out of lives.

Joe Williams: Oh, yeah. Saving was a big change, I guess. Not difficult, but it meant you could do it in pieces. With the original, we had to leave our Mac on all night and not do anything else with it until we finished the game. Not to mention all the dungeon runs to pile up lives... I always thought the high score was backwards -- it was harder to get a low score when winning the game than a high score.

Jon God: There was someone on the Dark Castle forums who beat the original on advanced with 13 rocks.

Joe Williams: LOL! Players can be amazing. I always thought of myself as an expert on Spaceward Ho!, but there are players who are much better than me.

Jon God: The same person beat all of BDC, starting on beginner and ending on Advanced, without dying or falling into the dungeon once.

Joe Williams: I never beat either game on advanced.

Jon God: There was a special ending for Beyond Dark Castle on Advanced.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wpxvlt_iC8

Joe Williams: I told you they were fanatics.

Jon God: Did you ever get a chance to try the RTDC level editor?

Joe Williams: Yeah -- it seemed great!

Jon God: Awesome. thanks for your time.

PUZZLE & ANSWER:

Each week, I hope to have a puzzle for you to solve, which will somehow relate to Dark Castle. This week's puzzle is in the form of a description without the word it belongs to, relating to castles.

Description: I am the open area inclosed by the castle walls.


Answer for last "week's" puzzle: Quarrel


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Feel free to send in feedback, what you did/didn't like, what you'd like to see, ect, as I would love to hear it.

Weekly Update

Apologies for not doing this sooner, I've been busier then busy. Plus, the holidays.

I am still debating weather to make this a bi-monthly update, or not, let me know what you think, or want, via the forum or comments down below. This week I will interview John-Robert La Porta, who is one of the forum moderators, and the author of the Mini vMac guide.

Jon God: Hi La Porta, welcome to the Weekly Update.

La Porta: Hi Jon, how are you?

Jon God: A bit worn out, but ready to serve the ever-watching readers.

La Porta: Hah, fair enough man, it's a good thing you are doing here for the forums.

Jon God: Speaking of the forums, I would like to thank you now for all the work you've done as a moderator.

La Porta: Well thank you, I wish I could be there more often to help out. My trek through med school has made it difficult to keep up. But I have been honored to do it. It's great to be part of something so crucial to the continuation of my favorite game as a kid

Jon God: What was your reaction to being selected as a moderator for the Dark Castle Forum?

La Porta: I really was happy about it. The whole community is terrific. I remember that you wanted some extra staff because of the anticipated flood of forum users from the release of DC3. In a good way, it came. Now we have a ton of people...and more keep coming.

Jon God: Yup, and between the whole Dark Castle Forum staff, we've been pretty good about stopping spam, and keeping things organized. Before we move on, you got anything to say about the rest of the staff?

La Porta: Sure. I think that the people I know best are you, Izdale, Gruz, and in a way, Richard. Izdale and Gruz have been great, I can talk to them about almost anything. Richard and I usually elbow each other with words now and then, all in fun. It is great to toss around conflicting ideas and views with him. All in all, I can't think of anyone who isn't a team player. It really has been going great.

Jon God: So, Return to Dark Castle finally did come out, what is your opinion on it?

La Porta: That is a huge question. I don't think one person's interpretation of it can be the same as anyone else's. I have been happy with in the most part. Me, I'm a stickler for consistency and originality, and I have to say that the game is pretty true to the originals. One thing I haven't been happy with is that there are so many secrets and so much to do that sometimes it becomes too much to handle. I realize that the game was designed to be either quick and dirty, or played to beat 100%, but I liked how the originals had a clear-cut path and objectives more.

Jon God: So, more or less pleased. Anything you would have done differently, besides what you just listed?

La Porta: Well, I think anyone would agree having the level editor released concurrently with the game would have been a major plus. We would have had content coming out of our ears by now. Otherwise, I think that the original "Heroes of Merit" music from the betas was better and more suited to the game. I also would have liked to see some of the sound effects more like the original (I liked the use of the "chain pull" sound for opening doors in the originals). Short of that, I can't criticize the game seeing as what the Zacks had to go through!

Jon God: Heh, I brought up some of the same things to Zack Black. Now, speaking of the Level Editor, do you have any plans for Level sets?

La Porta: Well, there are two specific level types that I have planned. One will be an "Incredible Machine" type of thing, where Bryant has to turn of conveyor belts, fire arrows, etc, to activate parts of the level, just like in TIM. The other is an idea that I had that I call "probability." In the Boston Science Museum, they have a set up with falling balls to test the bell curve hypothesis (where most balls will fall in the middle, and less outlying that point). I want to have two rock henchmen at the top of a vertical scrolling level, and have the walls set up in a pattern so the rock henchmen throw the rocks in towards the middle, and the balls funnel down vertically placed walls in a random pattern to potentially hit Bryant on his way up. I think it will be pretty neat.

Jon God: After hearing some of the fan ideas for Level sets, I am pretty excited for the editor, how long do you imagine people will continue creating content for DC3?

La Porta: Well, I can base what I know on other games. The Marathon series lives on in it's Aleph One incarnation. My brother has been working on level sets for it since the late 90's, and he still works on them. He is far from the only one. Every once and a while, I get into it as well. I think that as long as the game has a popular following, we can continue to expect seeing content for years to come.

Jon God: A bit of a drastic change of subjects, you wrote the Mini vMac guide, which can be found on the Dark Castle Forum, what was your incentive for that?

La Porta: I think what started it was the fact that we as a community didn't have a unified guide for how to get Mini vMac and DC up and running. I figured that since I had been using Mini vMac for years before the forum started, and had spoken with it's developer Paul Pratt, that I would be in a pretty good position to write it. It was more difficult than I thought. The first version was decent, but I thought it was too cluttered. That is why I made version 2.0. I am always looking for feedback on it as well, but I am pretty satisfied with it. Many people have been able to use it to get DC/BDC up and running, and I don't think that I could ask for a better result than that.

Jon God: I know it's taught me a thing or two. :) How did you first get to know Paul Pratt?

La Porta: My involvement with Mini vMac started before there even was Mini vMac. I started using the original vMac way back when that was all that was around. It was far less refined than it is now: DC wouldn't even work correctly - if you pressed the movement keys in any direction, they would stay "stuck" going that way until you hit a wall!. Once vMac stopped being developed, I discovered that Paul was creating his own version which was much smaller in size. I was pretty excited about it, and he seemed pretty open to feedback. Also, I have real Mac Plusses at my disposal, so I could test if problems were present on the actual hardware, or were genuine bugs of his program. So, I reported more to him, and requested features, etc. He also made suggestions to the guide as well.

Jon God: Is he a Dark Castle fan as well?

La Porta: You know, I never actually asked him specifically. I think we should get him to join the forum though!

Jon God: Was it surprising to find this community initially?

La Porta: Well, honestly, I can't remember how I found it. I probably was looking randomly for Dark Castle-related stuff (as it was always on and off my mind). When I got there, I think there were about 5 of you guys on there regularly. It was wonderful: such excitement - in those days, we didn't even know the game would ever be done for sure! It was much more focused on DC/BDC. I had always assumed that there weren't that many fans, but apparently there were.

Jon God: Any closing comments for our readers?

La Porta: Sure. I think that it is wonderful that you are doing these interviews, and I think that we will continue to have an active forum, especially when the editor comes out. Otherwise, just a thank you to all the members of the forum, helping us grow from the less than 10 real members when I joined, to over 100 now. Thank you!

Jon God: Thank you for your time, and Goodnight!

La Porta: You are welcome!


PUZZLE & ANSWER:

Each week, I hope to have a puzzle for you to solve, which will somehow relate to Dark Castle. This week's puzzle is in the form of a description without the word it belongs to, relating to castles.

Description: I am an arrow for a crossbow. What am I called?


Answer for last week's puzzle: Pillory


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Feel free to send in feedback, what you did/didn't like, what you'd like to see, ect, as I would love to hear it.

Weekly Update

I am still debating weather to make this a bi-monthly update, or not, let me know what you think, or want, via the forum or comments down below. This week I will interview Jonathan Gay, one of the original creators of Dark Castle, and Beyond Dark Castle. He went on to create Flash, and then form his own company, Greenbox Technology.

Jon God: Have you ever thought about returning to game development?

Jonathan Gay: I really enjoyed building Airborne! and the first two versions of Dark Castle but I've have not been tempted to try another game. I find game technology very interesting but I've always spent more time programming than playing games and I find it's interesting to keep trying new things so it's been good to get to work in a variety of areas of software in my career.

Jon God: Have you gotten a chance to play Return to Dark Castle, if so, what did you think?

Jonathan Gay: I have not played Return to Dark Castle. I have a fondness for the simplicity of the original Dark Castle so it does seem like an interesting challenge to try and keep that feel while taking advantage of the capabilities of modern computers.

Jon God: What inspired Dark Castle?

Jonathan Gay: There were a combination of things. The technology we had available on the Mac was one driver. We had gained some skills with working with digitized sound on the Mac from Airborne! and I also did some work to get smooth flicker free animation on the Mac. We also wanted a game that made sense with the mouse and the keyboard as input. Many arcade games used a joystick but that was not available on the Mac. Having a talented artist and animator, Mark Stephen Pierce, on the team was also a new thing for Mac games at the time so that allowed us to do good animation. Mark was in San Francisco and I was in San Diego so we met for a couple days in San Diego to develop an idea, Mark started sending artwork and animation mockups and I started making it work.

Jon God: How long did it take to write Dark Castle?

Jonathan Gay: It took about a year.

Jon God: Was there anything you could remember that didn't make it into the games?

Jonathan Gay: There were certainly some sound effects we did not use. I think we used most of the animations that Mark created.

Jon God: Was the original vision of the game supposed to be scary or comedic?

Jonathan Gay: I think we are aiming for a touch of serious but fun. Kind of like the experience of the Pirates of the Caribean at Disneyland.

Jon God: Did you ever expect the games to do so well?

Jonathan Gay: It was early on the Mac so we did not really know what to expect in terms of sales. I wanted to make the best game on the Mac but I assumed that it would fade away in year or two as people wrote new and better games. The game sold well but we never really knew how many copies were out in the world as a result of piracy.

Jon God: A lot of people switched to mac, because of Dark Castle, and Beyond Dark Castle. In general, Dark Castle defined mac gaming for years, and showed what the mac was capable of, was it hard to achieve such quality?

Jonathan Gay: The key to the quality was the team of a good programmer and a talented artist. The game was certainly a lot of work. The startup screen was written in Pascal but the whole game was written in 68000 assembly language which can be tedious. The debugger, MacsBug, I used was not very sophisticated at the time so it was pretty low level work. Defining the animation offsets and sequences using assembler macros and def statements was also pretty tedious.

Jon God: Did you ever have plans for a third Dark Castle?

Jonathan Gay: No. SuperPaint was making much more money than the games for Silicon Beach Software at the time so that pushed the company to focus on graphics software.

Jon God: Did you ever imagine that 22 years later there would still be people playing what you helped create, along with having communities based around it?

Jonathan Gay: I never would have guessed it. I think Dark Castle was the first game on the Mac to bring together digitized sound, good animation and game play with a bit of depth. I think that first experience of hearing sounds react to you actions and working to get the timing right to get through the various levels seems to have had a lasting impact on people.

Jon God: How did you originally get involved with the project?

Jonathan Gay: I had met Charlie Jackson, the founder of Silicon Beach Software, at a Mac User group meeting. He did not have much startup capital so he was looking for programmers who could work and get paid royalities after the game sold. Since I was still in school and living at home, I did not need an income. The first game I did for them was Airborne! That did well so took what we learned about building Mac games, found an artist and we did a second more ambitious game, Dark Castle.

Jon God: The credits list Dick Noel as the person behind the sounds, but I have been unable to find any information on him, anything you remember about him?

Jonathan Gay: I never met Dick. He was a professional voice. He was reputed to have some work on some of the Flintstones cartoons but I was never clear on which character or how much he did. Eric Zocher went to his home studio with a list of sounds we wanted. Eric spent an afternoon and came back with an audio tape. Dick did pretty much all of the human sounds. The rat squeak was a women in the Silicon Beach office and the clanking noise was a metal part under a folding table in the office.

Jon God: How hard was it to fit a game of such high quality on two 800KB disks?

Jonathan Gay: Fitting it into the 128k of RAM on the Mac was a bigger issue than the disks. We had some very simple sound compression and some simple image compression but since the images were all 1 bit they weren't that big. Since the code was written in assembly language and the data for the levels was defined by hand, that part tended to stay small on it's own.

Jon God: Do you by any chance know when the game was released, more then just the year?

Jonathan Gay: I don't recall.



And there you go, see you again after christmas!

PUZZLE & ANSWER:

Each week, I hope to have a puzzle for you to solve, which will somehow relate to Dark Castle. This week's puzzle is in the form of a description without the word it belongs to, relating to castles.

Description: I am a punishment frame that usually grips victim's hands and head, so onlookers can throw garbage.


Answer for last week's puzzle: Atilliator


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Feel free to send in feedback, what you did/didn't like, what you'd like to see, ect, as I would love to hear it.

Weekly Update

(Apologies on this taking 2 extra days)

I am debating weather to make this a bi-monthly update, or not, let me know what you think, or want, via the forum or comments down below. This I will be talking to a member from our community, and one of the moderators of the Dark Castle Forum, we will be talking about the community, history, and his currently work in progress Dark Castle website, http://www.princeduncan.com/


Jon God: Hello, thank you for joining me today.

gruz: My pleasure. *Smiles*

Jon God: Let's start with the Dark Castle forum, what was it like to find a community of people that also still played and enjoyed Dark Castle?

gruz: I honestly never thought I would find such a place, it was a real delight to see that other people were still interested in a game I grew up with in the 80's.

Jon God: How did you originally find the forum?

gruz: Hmmm... I believe it was through Wikipedia. I remember I registered on the forum, and lurked for a few days before I felt that I had something to add of some value. I posted a link to a guide on how to setup Mini vMac on a keychain flash drive. After I posted that, I was surprised on how friendly the community was.

Jon God: Let's move forward some time, you were the first moderator for the forum, and I have often called you the fastest, mod on the forum, is this something you're proud of?

gruz: Hahaha, I was and still am glad to help out whenever I can. I took the responsibility pretty seriously when I first was appointed moderator. Actually it was unhealthy, as I'd be checking the forum 30 times a day or more, every hour that I was awake. I honestly am glad that we have a team of people now. La Porta and Izdale make life a lot easier for me now, and they do an excellent job. Thanks guys.

Jon God: What do you think draws people to the Dark Castle series?

gruz: I honestly feel that the majority of modern computer gamers who have never played the originals, or even Color Dark Castle, probably won't be into the series if they're coming into it in 2008. The thing is though, that the originals sold millions of copies on several different platforms. Those people still exist, and the sounds and graphics of the originals were so good that they're burned into people's brains. All they need is to see or hear those things to instantly spark the Dark Castle memories buried deep in their brains, and they're going to want to revisit the old games, or buy Return to Dark Castle.

Jon God: Do you think it's just circumstance that Dark Castle has a community following it, when most games from the same period have little to no following, or is it something about the game?

gruz: Definitely the game. People love great graphics, sound, and gameplay, even still to this day. Dark Castle delivered something that was unseen at the time, and nothing could come close. People remember it because of just that. Although the graphics aren't what they once were, I still love them. In fact, I have been known to hit command-option and click on the demo button in the title screen and just watch it for a while.

Jon God: Let's move away from the old Dark Castles, a while ago, you registered the domain 'Princeduncan.com', and have been working on it off and on since then, why should the Dark Castle community be excited for it?

gruz: We, as a community, aren't a particularly large one. We have our core members, and our drive-by members. I want more people, and more variety of opinions being thrown around on the forums. The main site of PrinceDuncan.com will probably offer nothing new to those that consider themselves 'Hardcore', but that was never the focus. My main goal with it is to spark those buried Dark Castle memories, and get people thinking about the game again. "Remember this game? Yeah? Wanna play it again?" Hopefully it will be worth the time and money that I'm putting into it, and eventually get some more people on the forums.

The downloads section however, is something that everyone will hopefully be able to enjoy. It's mostly completed and allows for custom levels and heros to be uploaded, commented on and rated on a 5 star system. You, Jon God, are working with me to provide some additional content also.

Jon God: I have seen the website and I think it's wonderful, I think other members of the forum will enjoy it quite a bit, and I can see the downloads section becoming the hub for downloads of Dark Castle related media around the web, any idea when it will be opened, or previewed to the public?

gruz: The downloads section will be officially opened up no later than when the level editor for Return to Dark Castle is released, even if it's not 100% how I want it. At this time, it looks like it might be opened up before the we get the level editor. It really won't do a lot of good until we get the level editor though, as the replay feature in Return to Dark Castle is still broken.

Jon God: Speaking of the level editor, have any plans saved for for the release of it?

gruz: Yes, I'm going to go take my laptop to McDonald's and create a wacky Dark Castle/Mc Chicken hybrid custom level.

Jon God: I dunno if I should take that as a serious answer, or just wait and see...

gruz: Next question.

Jon God: Okie dokie, having waited so long for Return to Dark Castle, what do you think of it, are you happy with how it ended up, or disappointed?

gruz: I absolutely loved Return to Dark Castle. I can't say that it captured me in the same way as the originals, but I'll be honest, there's no way that it could have. I love it for what it is, and I think that it's a great step forward for the series. The game feels a bit behind though, and I probably would've loved it even more if it was released back in the early 2000's. Stuff happens though, and I can understand where they're coming from. I'm hoping that Z Sculpt will deliver our next fix before the end of 2010, we're ready for more. The Zacks have earned a bunch of lifetime fans with this game, don't keep us hanging.

Jon God: I hear you, so what about your youtube channel, I remember you talking about making a video comparing all versions of Dark Castle, but I don't know it's current status, feel like telling us about your channel?

gruz: My Dark Castle YouTube channel is another way that I am trying to spark those Dark Castle memories in people's brains. It's a lot of fun for me to make videos when I have free time, so I try to post at least 1 Dark Castle video a month. The channel used to be my own personal channel with videos of family and pets, but after I had posted a bunch of videos to it, I decided to transform it into a Dark Castle only channel. I want to thank everyone who's taken the time to comment on my videos and subscribe, it means a lot.

I've had the files and footage for the comparison video on my desktop computer for quite a while, and was pretty much abandoned for a while. I've recently picked the project back up, and decided to do something different with it. It'll be basically what it was originally supposed to be, but probably a lot more info and critique. It's probably better that I waited on that project.

(EDITOR'S NOTE) If you are reading this and haven't subscribed to his channel yet, what are you waiting for, click here and subscribe.

Jon God: Alright, preference, do you prefer Dark Castle, or Beyond Dark Castle?

gruz: Dark Castle, it's what I played first. I always loved how much better Beyond Dark Castle looked though...

Jon God: Fair enough, got any closing comments?

gruz: I want to thank the community for being so awesome.

I also want to thank Z Sculpt for not giving up on DC3.

Jon, thanks for your Dark Castle passion, it's given us all hours and hours of entertainment.

Support Paul Pratt, http://minivmac.sourceforge.net/ without him we'd be playing Dark Castle on crappy emulators like a bunch of jerks. DONATE TO HIM.

Keep an eye on http://www.PrinceDuncan.com (there's a hidden message in the website, can you find it?)

Have a good day everyone!

Jon God: Alright, thank you for your time, and constant work around the Dark Castle Community.



Stay tuned, next week I will have an exclusive interview with Jonathan Gay, one of the original creators of Dark Castle, and Beyond Dark Castle, who went on to create Flash. If there are no problems the blog should be up Wednesday, December 24th, some people know it as 'Christmas Eve.' :P This is one interview you wont want to miss.


PUZZLE & ANSWER:

Each week, I hope to have a puzzle for you to solve, which will somehow relate to Dark Castle. This week's puzzle is in the form of a description without the word it belongs to, relating to castles.

Description: I am a castle worker skilled in making crossbows, what is my title?


Answer for last week's puzzle: Embrasures


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Feel free to send in feedback, what you did/didn't like, what you'd like to see, ect, as I would love to hear it.

Short Weekly Update Delay

The update for this week will be shortly delayed, it should hopefully be up before the end of the week if not sooner. If it's not up by the end of the week, I will give you another update, sorry for the wait guys, just hold tight.

Weekly Update

I am going to try and start a weekly update, which will give us a look into Z Sculpt, and what goes into developing and porting Return to Dark Castle. This week, will focus on the rumroed PC port, and development of Return to Dark Castle, via an interview with Zack Morris.


Jon God: So, when was it decided that there would be a PC port of Return to Dark Castle?

Zack Morris: Well, I can't say anything conclusive about this, because nothing is set in stone and SHFF is not sure about the ramifications of doing a port, but I can say that it is something we considered soon after finishing the Mac version. Before that, the prospect was just too ominous.

Jon God: Does that mean you've given up on Mac gaming?

Zack Morris: Definitely not. The Mac is a bigger market now than ever before. Lately we've given up on limiting ourselves to just the Mac, because the market is fairly small compared to the vast ocean of all platforms combined. The iPhone store has been a big surprise, so if something like that was implemented (either through the iTunes store or otherwise), we'd see the Mac market more closely approach its actual size of maybe 10% of PC games.

Jon God: I recently brought up to you Mac Game Arcade a similar system to Steam, but for mac, which falls in line with what you were just saying, does that mean we can look forward to seeing your older games, or newer games from you on this or similar systems?

Zack Morris: The other Zack and I are busy making our game engine compatible with the iPhone and other platforms so that we can "write once and run anywhere". This is comparable to the workload we faced when we ported Dark Castle from OS 9 to OS X. After the engine is updated, we are going to recompile all of our games under it so that they can be rolled out under other portals. We'd very much like to get modernized versions of all of our games into as many venues as possible, especially the low end since they might find new appeal there.

Jon God: Have you been watching the success of the retro acrade games on Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and Wiiware?

Zack Morris: More like being blinded by it. Those platforms are revolutionary, as big a paradigm shift as the internet was for shareware back in 1995. The difficulty lies in being in the right place at the right time to anticipate new markets. It's apparently much easier for a Flash developer to get on Xbox Live Arcade than it is for the typical baggage-laden Mac or PC developer. That's why we're updating our engine to be not quite so Mac-centric. I correspond daily with a guy making a tidy sum from his iPhone game, and he has big plans for the Wii.

Jon God: Looking at the success, of say, Jonathan Mak (Creator of the PlayStation Network game, Everyday Shooter) does it seem like a path you might want to follow? For clarification, Jonathan Mak was a independent game developer, who was found by Sony, and now has a mutli-game deal with them, and they give him breathing room to make whatever he wants.

Zack Morris: That's what I would call a path to stardom. Not everyone can be a Jonathan Mak (back in my day I aspired to be John Carmack, hah), but we can all aspire to be better artists, designers and creators. My hat's off to him, but I think perhaps we are too far down a different trail. Success for us will be having a stable presence on the web and developing markets, and make enough from that to be an independent studio. Shareware games were somewhat of a means to an end for me, so I don't see myself as having the passion to be in the spotlight, so to speak.

Jon God: I know your hands are tied in terms of what you can say about the future of Return to Dark Castle due to SHFF. However, if it were up to you, would you want to port Return to Dark Castle to some of these services? (Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, WiiWare, iPhone games library)

Zack Morris: I would very much like to port Dark Castle, but truth be told, I'd like to see our engine ported so that we have a full cross-platform library. Then we get all of the rest of our games ported for free, like people using SDL or other libs.

Jon God: I know you cannot talk numbers about the sales of Return to Dark Castle, but compared to your expectations, how is it doing?

Zack Morris: It's doing far better than any of our other games ever did. We've been able to work fairly independently now for 6 months, and I've paid down my student loans and other debts substantially. The problem is that the Mac market is not so much limited as it is remote. The signal to noise ratio is enormous. We'd probably see 10 times the sales on the iPhone, not so much because it's a bigger market, but because it's more convenient than anything that's come before, once you pay your "iPhone entry fee". The total sales are perhaps a little lower than our original expectations, but the possibilities that have opened up because of it, far exceeded our expectations.

Jon God: Moving back to the development, what were some problems that came as a surprise when original developing Return to Dark Castle?

Zack Morris: The long duration of the final push from release candidate to final was unexpected for sure. Also, memory management became a non-issue in OS X, so much of our optimized OS 9 code to get DC3 running in 20 megs of ram became cumbersome. Zack did all of the actual game programming, and I remember he spent the most time fine-tuning the level engine and sprite management. I spent the most time making optimized blitters and 16 bit color code for PowerPC, which surprisingly became slower than plain loops when Apple move to Intel. So the biggest surprise of all was Apple constantly changing their code base. We just never saw that coming when we thought we were done back in 1999. When we came to terms with that, I suppose I was surprised how easily we adopted OpenGL or moved from 8 to 16 bit color. I'm still surprised how cumbersome input devices and force feedback are on all platforms. So there are hurdles we ran into by using the wrong approach. For example, Quicktime is a tremendously complicated API that does things that Flash does trivially. So at first glance, something that DC3 does that looks simple was actually very complicated. The swinging ropes use a complex blitter that's a few lines of code in OpenGL. In a way, all of DC3 came as a surprise, both in complexity and time required, but at each step of the process, I can't see how we could have done anything differently. It was a perfect storm of setbacks, but we learned a lot of what not to do. And, I am grateful every day that we aren't the Duke Nukem Forever guys!

Jon God: Has the delay of the level editor surprised you?

Zack Morris: Yes and no. The editor itself was essentially done the day we finished DC3 in-house. Unfortunately, we didn't anticipate how much effort would be required to actually ship DC3. It took us many months of testing and bug fixes. So you multiply that amount of loose end cleanup, with the potential for people to really shoot themselves in the foot with the editor, and I can see why SHFF is hesitant to release it. That said, at some point you just have to let people run with it. Now that the initial sales of DC3 have run their course, I'm hopeful that SHFF will release the editor. Its release is tied into some other decisions that I won't go into, but there is a big support workload involved, similar to the one we faced and continue to manage, involving the Replay system.

Jon God: When do you expect we will hear about Z Sculpt's next projects?

Zack Morris: Well, Zack and I just started a new schedule at our day jobs that has me working 3 days per week and him 2. Before that, we were working too much overtime, which left us just 2 days per week to meet and write code. We should release an iPhone app in a few weeks, then an update to DC3 to fix the graphical bugs people have been experiencing on the newest Macs, and then our engine should be updated enough to release updated versions of some of our games. We are constantly diligent, which is hard to demonstrate to the public, so it's mostly a matter of finalizing our engine. I would say that just 10% of our time goes into actual game design. The techniques I learned for internet play in Khufu are going into the engine, and Zack and I each have a new game planned for early spring, which we will announce on zsculpt.com.

Jon God: Just a few more questions.

Zack Morris: Ok.

Jon God: How was it to finally release something you had been working on for so long?

Zack Morris: It was a huge weight off our shoulders. We don't want to go through that long of a development cycle again. Luckily we won't have to, because computers are finally starting to stabilize. There really is a best way to do most anything, which wasn't reflected in the underlying code of OS 9, which is what DC3 was based in. Now we can use modern techniques for a much faster turn around time. We have converted our engine to OpenGL, OpenAL and have rewritten some of the cryptic Apple file management and input device code using the standard c++ libraries and HID. We are still going to do 2D games, but they will have a much richer feel to them, more like a Flash game, except without the performance penalty.

I've personally started talking with more Mac developers, so have learned volumes about lua scripting and other rapid application development tools. If you base a game off of standard libraries, you don't have to worry about Apple changing them. That means that probably over half our workload just disappears for the next game. Which doubles our productivity and potential for success.

Jon God: What have you thought of the fan reaction to Return to Dark Castle?

Zack Morris: It's pretty overwhelming, but not so much so that I can't still be a part of it. *Smiles* We don't get flooded with emails or constant IM requests. I think the DC fan base is quite savvy and down to earth. Many of the fans have helped us with Khufu beta testing and I consider their comments invaluable. For the most part, feedback has been positive, but it's hard sometimes when people criticize bugs, because they simply don't understand how big the DC3 code is, or how many other projects we juggle. I often wish we only developed for a single console, like the Super Nintendo, because support would be a non-issue. I hope they aren't too disappointed with the setbacks, because honestly I think I would be in their place. For example, I'm no fan of DRM, and sometimes I wonder if we arrived at an acceptable compromise with eSellerate. The iTunes and iPhone stores seem to have found a middle ground. We have fixes in the works for inconveniences people have faced, and I really think that this stuff is getting better over time, albeit slowly. Hopefully the level editor will spark a renewed interest in DC3. We go through these long periods of inactivity and then a burst of new releases, so if people are still around when that happens, they won't be disappointed.

Jon God: Any closing comments?

Zack Morris: Just that, we are grateful to everyone for hanging in there, and never give up hope. Look at what's happened in the world in the last couple of months. Anything is possible, and I may not remember the years 2001-2008 very fondly, but they were pivotal years in my life. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, that sort of thing. After a decade of working on DC3, we hadn't really stopped to think what life would be like when it was done. But now, we're starting to think in new ways we hadn't anticipated. Zack and I feel like we've reached about 5% of our creative potential. We want to try making some tools and games to just make life a lot more pleasurable. Success doesn't have to involve great struggle to still be sweet. There are other ways of working and living. Thank you for the questions, I hope I answered them satisfactorily. And thanx for running such a great forum, I think I've enjoyed your community more than I've actually played DC3

Jon God: Alright, thank you for your time, and thank you for helping deliver a wonderful game to all those who've long been waiting for it.

Zack Morris: Thanks, 'till next time!


There you have it, I would keep your fingers crossed for more info from SHFF on the level editor.


PUZZLE:

Each week, I hope to have a puzzle for you to solve, which will somehow relate to Dark Castle. This week's puzzle is in the form of a description without the word it belongs to, relating to castles.

Description: The Arrow loops in the Merlons.

What am I?


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Feel free to send in feedback, what you did/didn't like, what you'd like to see, ect, as I would love to hear it.