Crystal Dragon

[1] Game concept/design by Ian Lewis. Coding by Dave Makin. Graphics & level design by Ian Lewis. Music by Jeff Rourke and sound FX by Ian Lewis.

[2] Magazine Publisher:Amiga Future no.89, March/April 2011 [downloadHERE].

[3] Game supports up to 4 floppy drives and requires players to first create a savegame disk if playing from disk.

[4] CRYSTAL DRAGON (playable demo) appeared on CU Amiga Coverdisk 101 (Feb 95) and is available for downloadHERE [Source: Amiga Magazine Rack].

[5] ***CRYSTAL DRAGON(full release)*** has been deemed freeware by main coder Dave Makin and is available for download from these sources:

- CRYSTAL DRAGON(English/German, ADF disk version) [Source: Dave Makin(coder), courtesy of the Internet Archive]
- CRYSTAL DRAGON(English/German, ADF disk version) [Source: AmigaPD]
- CRYSTAL DRAGON(English/German, ADF disk version) [Source: Amiga Future]
- CRYSTAL DRAGON(English/German, WHDLoad HD version) [Source: Amiga Future]


TRIVIA:

[1] More famous for racing games such as LOTUS 1, 2 & 3, CRYSTAL DRAGON was Magnetic Fields' first ever RPG and is perhaps best described as a 3D RPG reminiscent of the classic DUNGEON MASTER.

[2] Main coder Dave Makin shared these memories from his 2 years spent on the development of the game:

'Hmmm, the developing process was pretty intense because there were only 2 of us, myself and Ian Lewis. Ian did all the graphics and designed the levels though I had some input with respect to what was possible as far as puzzles went (i.e. switches/pits/teleports etc.).

The basic system for health/stamina/food/water/experience/poison/disease etc. was one of the first things we did. This was tested with a small AMOS program that ran in extreme accelerated mode as far as all the stats were concerned and we tweaked things so that (for example) when you got to the green dragon (poison) if you got a full poison bar but were at the estimated levels for that point in the game then you could just about manage to survive I have to admit that the game editor was a bit of a pain for Ian to use because due to lack of available memory there wasn't a proper "undo" mode, this is partly why there's the odd lock or switch remaining in the game that are just red-herrings

Overall it took two years, one of the most difficult things to solve was the save game and current game state saving (when changing dungeon levels) each level was 64k plus another 32k for other data, I think there were 24 levels and we allowed up to 5 saved games - and all this had to fit on a floppy. In the end I used a "save changes" method - however if you play the game a fair way through and then proceed to drop a single object on each square of one of the middle levels then it's quite possible that major failure will occur when exiting the level or saving the game !! As each level was designed Ian would keep playtesting and adjusting the amount of food, weapons and spells etc. so that if you played reasonably well then you'd not starve or be too overmatched etc.

[Errata: A small correction - I'd forgotten that even using "save changes" we only managed to allow 2 saved games per floppy - the 5 saves was the hard drive version

I also didn't make clear - the saved games even on floppy were such that you could play the game to the final level then save it as save A, then go back to level 1 (making changes along the way) and save it as game B then go back down to the last level again making changes and if you then went back to level 1 things would basically be the same as they were on the way down (i.e. the current game levels were saved) - then if you loaded saved game B and went back to the last level things on the way down would be as they were when you saved game B and if you then loaded game A you'd again find all levels remembered as when saved.

I think there were 24 levels so altogether that's the equivalent of 3*24*(64k+32k) = 6.75MB on one 1.44MB floppy just for the level data - all without any knowledge (at the time) of "modern" compression methods such as Huffman encoding.]

I say it was intense because at one point I was programming for around 16 hours a day for 7 days a week over a period of around two months. During this time I got really annoyed one day because some of my code seemed to have disappeared - it was only after discussion with Ian that I realised the relevant code was something I'd worked out in my head the night before but hadn't actually written yet

Just to add that I think one of my favourite features of the game was the confusion spell, especially as applied in a certain winding corridor with traps firing confusion spells along with moving pits

Unfortunately we only made a few thousand (pounds) for two reasons, first it was released through Black Legend and they lived up to their name as one of the directors ran off with all the money a few months after release of Crystal Dragon (and Parys Technografx' Tower of Souls).

Also of course the release was a little late in the day for an Amiga game and after the blow with respect to Black Legend things went worse as Commodore began to fail and Amiga games disappeared from high street shelves. I forever curse the Commodore management for the completely insane decision to produce a console device rather than doing what they should have and releasing a (cheap) native 68040 Amiga computer with vastly improved graphics by incorporating a quality graphics card (for the time) such as the Picasso.' [Source: Dave Makin(coder), via messages posted to EAB].