The Spiel…
“Ever since you were eight years old you have dreamt of one thing. That is to mow the lawn on the moon. On your eighteenth birthday, NASA turn up at your house to see if you have the right stuff.
Six fiendish mowing challenges await. If you impress them enough, you will get the chance to yes, you read that correctly, mow the grass on the moon.
If that wasn’t enough, if you successfully mow the grass on the moon, you will be able to unlock No Man‘s Lawn. This gives you the chance to explore and mow 2048 procedurally generated lawns across the universe. All created with a faithfully reproduced ZX spectrum palette - what will you discover?
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| ZX Spectrum Pallette |
Background
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| Life in eigthies Britain. |
Growing up in Britain in the eighties could sometimes be a very depressing experience. There were after all only three television channels until Channel 4. Margaret Thatcher had personally stolen all our milk and the Ford Escort was the most popular car. However, for this young schoolboy, there was a solace to be found in the pages of the magazines Your Sinclair, Crash and Sinclair User.
In April of 1988, On the cover tape of Your Sinclair was the best ever game released for the ZX Spectrum. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator by Duncan Macdonald. Playing this game, made you forget for a brief moment that all your eggs were potentially infected with salmonella. It also spawned a number of sequels and remakes , such as football lawnmower simulator, golf lawnmower simulator and many more.
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| The original Spectrum Version |
Lawnmower Dreams
This is not the first time I have attempted a lawnmower simulator game. I mentioned on my ITEN post that back in the day when I wrote financial software, I used to sometimes hide games in my applications. I‘ve actually stumbled across some proof of this. Back in 2000, I wrote (Visual Basic 5 I think ?) an accurate remake of the original spectrum version. If you have a computer powerful enough to run it, you can download it from here. It is the one where the author is Robert Smith (me) stamped 22 June 2000. I believe this ended up hidden in a payroll system at the time.
Now nostalgia is great and all, but computer technology has moved on a bit since 1988 and I wanted to write more than a simulator. I wanted to create a dream, a sense of nirvana, utopia if you must.
This started life as the roller-a-ball tutorial from Unity. I finished the tutorial and started playing around with what would happen if I did this, and this and lo and behold Lawnmower Dreams was born.
Status
- Currently, I would say the game is 80% complete in terms of framework, 30 % complete in terms of gameplay.
- I have a major physics bug in the game. The surface is meant to behave differently depending on level. I have set up separate physics materials but the code to select and switch between them is not correct.
- There is a football stadium level (end of the video) which is completely buggered at the moment.
- Bizzare bug in scoring where it is possible to get a higher score for cocking up the level than completing it.
Next Steps
Complete rewrite and tidy up. The code I am writing now and the code I wrote at the start of this are different beasts. I am also hoping the tidy up will help trace the errors above. I also want to see if I can get it working on my Samsung GearVR.
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