Leadlight released officially after competing in IFComp 2010

[bloomer_au <bloomer@iprimus.com.au>]

Hi everyone,

I can now make my own public announcement about the release of my
Apple II horror text adventure game, Leadlight.

The game just finished competing in the 2010 Interactive Fiction
Competition. Players voted on as many of 26 entries as they could play
within six weeks, during which time game authors were not allowed to
publicly discuss their entries or those of other authors online -
hence my own silence on it, and the fact that a few Apple II folks
stumbled across it under their own steam in the meantime :)

http://ifcomp.org/

Leadlight placed 14th out of 26 with voters, and also won the Golden
Banana of Discord for being the game which achieved the highest
standard deviation amongst the scores it received. The game was
obviously an anomaly amongst the 90% of entries written with the state
of the art Inform system. The majority of people who'd never touched
an Apple II before played Leadlight using ActiveGS, either through my
website with the plugin or offline with the standalone app. That the
game was still able to gather fans and pass almost half the Inform
entries in placings was a great result.

All the answers to those questions I've asked over the past year
in .programmers about Apple II emulators, assembly or search routines,
zero page locations, onerr behaviour and Prodos were put to use in the
making of this game, so my thanks to everyone in Apple II land for
their help in coding a game that was extraordinarily difficult to
make.

The game is derived from Eamon, and demonstrates many significant
improvements on the Eamon engine, including:

1. Nouns can have synonyms
2. All objects and enemies can have at least two descriptions, one for
their first appearance and others for when they are examined later.
3. The parser has an automatic disambiguation feature.
4. The parser zaps control and other unwanted characters.
5. In certain circumstances you can undo your last move. This does not
use the STORE command and requires no disk access.
6. Multiple save slots and an autosave command.

The game requires only an enhanced Apple IIe to run but will use the
Apple IIGS's screen border colour features to signal certain game
events.

The game can run off either one 3.5 inch floppy or two 5.25 inch
floppies, and is hard disk installable and Finder friendly (i.e. you
can quit back to Prodos/GSOS - this is a feature I only worked on
after input from the .programmers forum.)

The game is presented as a complete package for the Apple II, with an
illustrated PDF manual and a Scott Adams style hint sheet representing
what you would have got in the box if it was a game you bought off the
shelf.

All of the artwork, instructions, background information and disk
images for the game can be found on the website:

http://leadlightgame.com

I hope you guys enjoy it.

-Wade