Presenting Leadlight Gamma

Last week I released Leadlight Gamma, a new Glulx incarnation of my 2010 Apple II-coded interactive fiction-survival horror-CRPG hybrid, Leadlight (here's Leadlight on IFDB). You can buy Leadlight Gamma for MacOS, Windows, Linux or iOS at itch.io for US$4. The game file is cross platform compatible and I offer various configurations of installer or interpreter+game bundles on the itch.io site:

http://wade-clarke.itch.io/leadlight-gamma

15-year-old Belinda Nettle is studying at Linville Girls High School in Australia's Blue Mountains. After falling asleep in the library one afternoon, she wakes from her mundane existence into a nightmare. Her classmates are transformed, nameless terrors seek her out across the schoolgrounds, and traps and tricks threaten her life at every turn. 

Can you help Belinda survive this terror-filled night and solve its mysteries? And will there be a new day?

The game also has a standalone site at http://leadlightgamma.heiresssoftware.com/

At the core of Leadlight Gamma is a faithful port of the original game, now enhanced for modern platforms with graphic automap, tutorial mode, unlockable extra content, behind-the-scenes tour mode and easter eggs, original soundtrack, artwork gallery and an accessibility mode for vision-impaired players.

Unfortunately the accessibility mode isn't a go on Macs yet because the only Mac interpreter that can run LLG is Gargoyle, and Gargoyle doesn't work with screen readers. I plan to talk about this and the various other technical challenges to accessibility programming I've been running into and learning about in another post in the near future.

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You might wonder what motivates someone to spend a long time remaking one of their games instead of moving onto the next one. I can summarise what happened like this:

A few years ago I was tossing about ideas for a sequel to the original Leadlight. It would have been all modern. No two-word parser, no Apple IIs in sight – just a brand new game. While these ideas weren't coalescing, I opened Inform up one evening and copy-pasted the description of Leadlight's first room into it to see how it looked. Before long I'd pasted some more rooms in, and I was experiencing a degree of pleasure and narcissism in being able to walk around in this world again in a new context. I got hooked on building the whole thing anew after overcoming the first engineering challenge I encountered (though I don't remember exactly what it was, now). I also realised the port would bring the game to more players, and just make it easier to get at.

So I've ended up doing a 180 on the idea I previously expressed that I had no interest in porting the game to Inform. I'd thought the 'building a ship in a bottle' feel of the original 8-bit project (for me) might be rendered invisible or pointless-feeling by taking it to a platform which could, relatively speaking, do anything. I didn't realise it would end up being another interesting permutation of the same experience. It was like building a scale model of the ship in the bottle, partly by squinting through the glass at the original ship, and partly by studying the microscopically scaled plans used to build the original ship.