Curly Squirrel is a promising looking GTW entry which puts you in the control of a two sprite red squirrel in a single screen adventure. The aim of the game is a little unclear, mainly because the preview is in such an early phase.
However, interestingly the game development was started way back in around 1991 by Roland Hermans and Joachim Wijnhoven. This is the running preview which you can check out. This seemed to have got leaked back in 2005, and it came to light that the project was still being worked on, but with new graphics by Johan Janssen (Who released a picture from the game that he did for Primary Star 2005).
Recently we have been given all of the remains we know exist of Curly Squirrel thanks to Marco Das for the submission. In the submission both Joachim and Johan spoke about the project.
Joachim had the following to say:
"We wanted to sell the game under our game label Visual Delight to CP Verlag (Germany) we had an idea for the bonus levels in the game just like Time Runner this with our squirrel and with different levels like the forest meanies. etc.
i still have an unused sid lying from this level, but maybe i can still use it somwhere."
Johan also had the following to say regarding the disk remains:
“Graphics on the d64 are all from JSL (Johan) and the graphics in the playable preview are from Joachim.
D64 consists of:
– loading pic
– title pic
– background pic named curly trees
– 5 intro pics should be animated
– a few sprites for the intro
– bitmap sprites for converting to sprites a bear and a tortoise
– a playable preview from the nineties with gfx from Joachim”
It seems that the project fell by the wayside for reasons still currently unknown back in 1991. The project was much later picked up by Johan, who was to redo all the graphics we believe. Music was stll to be completed by Joachim (and hopefully we should be seeing/hearing the SID tunes very soon).
More details soon, but its believed that the coder decided to leave the project and a new developer was seeked to continue the project and complete it. Unfortunately no programmer could be found, and the plans to have a two screen level based game was axed. And now all the remains have been submitted to GTW, including many new pieces of artwork by Johan which have not been seen before. You can find everything on the download disk, including an executable preview. The screenshots can be viewed in the shots section if you do not want to dig out a graphic viewer (We just ran them through Congo to see them).
I’m sure the full picture of this game will be cleared up soon, but for now check it out!…
Sadly never quite to be…
Contributions: Marco Das, Johan Janssen, Joachim Wijnhoven
