MSP (Accidentally?) confirms PC/iPhone port of DC3

Fear not other platform DC fans, it seems that Mark Steven Pierce confirmed a PC and iPhone port of Return to Dark Castle, so no more worries.

iPhone though? How will that work?

LINK

Backup in case the comment is pulled:

PC World names the original Dark Castle one of the best mac games ever

Well, I'm glad to see that people still remember Dark Castle as well as we do.

PC World named the original Dark Castle one of the beat mac games of all time.

LINK

Sorry...

I know you are all curious on what happened to the weekly updates....

Well, I've been really busy in my personal life, but hopefully I will have time to start them up again soon.

Be sure to watch here, or the forums for an announcement.

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.