Heng was to be a sort of Civilization-based game on the C64, which was developed from around 2009 time.
The idea was for the game to be a real-time strategy with 2 players (or player vs AI), where you have to get knights to build cannons/ships.
Development got to a fairly advanced stage, which you can see from the final remains here for downloading. It is pretty impressive.
So what happened to the game? Enthusi sadly lost interest in developing the game, and so it was resigned to the scrapheap. More details of the game can be read in Creators Speaks.
What you see here is all that remains of the game, so it is an open and shut case!
Contributions: Enthusi, Jazzcat
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Preview_Heng (zip)
Gallery
Creator speaks
Enthusi talks about work on Heng:
“Heng is my reply to an idea of Civilization on the C64 from early 2009 (at least thats when I last worked on it). I wanted to turn this into a real-time strategy game with 2 players or player vs AI. You’d need knights to build cannons and/or ships. You’d require cannons to attack castles etc. I still have it all designed in my head :)
Again, I’d rather rewrite it from scratch rather than putting in all that extra work that proper game design requires. The engine uses tiled Hires bitmap gfx. 3×3 ‘chars’ per big tile + one multiplexed overlay hires sprite per tile (which doesnt cover 3 of the 24 rows).
So basically 2 free colors per cell + 1 free color per tile. Its featuring 2 zoom modes, standard mode with 7×7 tiles(24×24 pixel) and a zoom with 21×21 tiles (8×8 pixel each)
A reasonable size for a complete MAP will be 96×40. (considering sprite layer and memory) In Zoom2 there will be no Sprite overlay! Instead units will occupy a whole 8×8 area. Probably one MAIN color (green=land, blue=water, maybe grey=mountain) and one UNIT-color. I.e. a black knight on grass or a yellow ship on the sea. After all this is the OVERview mode.
In the mini map only single color HiRes pixels will indicate units (EOR blinking)
MAYBE with switches: own units, units player 1, 2, 3…. since colors cant be used to distinguish players… The text-window is a proportional font plotter.
Maybe the coolest feature is the map-generator. In two iterative steps the 2-col bitmap in the lower right is auto-converted into the larger game map with a smooth-coastline-renderer. Consider the size of the executable, less than 6 KB.
I think this could have been a fun game. Hopefully, I will pick up something like that one day. All gfx here are mere place holders by me.”
enthusi 01/2013
