Barahir's Adventure: Askar's Castle (8-bit)

[arj0n]

BrocantyGames presents:

Barahir's Adventure: Askar's Castle



Barahir's Adventure: Askar's Castle is a fantasy themed, 1st-person perspective, point and click adventure game with a slight rpg element in the form of a health system. The game has 8-bit graphics in a 320x240 resolution and uses flip-screen room transition.
Barahir Adventure: Askar's Castle is is freeware



Barahir was originally developed by Lorien and published by L.K. Avalon. Released in 1993 for Atari 8-bit only, it was only available in Polish.
The game has a menu system-based interface in the form of a row of icons.

The original game seem to suffer from 2 major bugs:
The first one is causing several rooms not showing the correct background but the one from the previous room.
The second one is the save system often providing corrupt save files.



This remake is available in English for Windows and Linux. The game uses a modern point 'n click interface, uses 4-color 8-bit graphics in a 320x240 resolution and is made using AGS v3.5.0.27.
The two major bugs that the original version suffered from have of course been omitted in this remake.

A new feature is that this remake can be played in 40 different palettes, which you can switch between at any time during the game.
The palettes resemble old console and computer systems plus a set of nice palettes based on well known games for the gb, gbc and sgb.

All the available palettes:

Here's a collage image showing all the palettes:

Spoiler

[close]

Download: Windows & Linux versions available
More information: BrocantyGames' itch.io page

v1.2:

• Being killed with a death trap causes a bug with RestartGame
• When placing wrong item item on pilar gives incorrectly formatted string with "%s" unfilled in response.
• item on the floor with wrong description "loaf of bread" corrected.
• Changed: the exit in the prison, since it was in the corner and therefor apperantly not visible enough.

v1.1:

• removed agsshell plugin usage because for some people it gives a (false-positive) anti-virus warning.
• load-cancel bug has been fixed.
• bedroom game-over bug has been fixed.

[Click'd]

It would have been better to show some palette examples instead of listing the names. At first I thought you posted the same picture three times.

[arj0n]

added screenshot with all palettes. 

[Crimson Wizard]

arj0n, could you tell, what is the use of agsshell plugin in this game? I have distrust against this plugin, because it lets run any random command on my system, in theory.

Ah, I also found a bug: in main menu if you click Load Game and then cancel, the main menu dissapears and inventory bar appears instead.
Bug #2,

Spoiler

if you use bed in the bedroom, after it sais "game over" you can continue playing as if nothing happened

[close]

[arj0n]

Thank you for the bug notifications, Crimson.
I used the agsshell plugin for opening a browser and go to brocantygames' itch.io page when clicking on a specific button in the panel GUI.
But as this plugin isn't always trusted by some anti-virus software, I decided to remove it from this game.

Barahir v1.1 is uploaded.

* removed agsshell plugin usage because for some people it gives a (false-positive) anti-virus warning.
* load-cancel bug has been fixed.
* bedroom game-over bug has been fixed.

[Crimson Wizard]

I finished playing the game! It was good and rather straightforward, except towards the final it turned into blind guessing where game will kill you for entering wrong passage without any method to predict that.

Because it's very low resolution I also had to move away from monitor to better understand what's drawn on screen .


BTW being killed with a death trap causes another bug:

in "room30.asc", line 22

Error: RestartGame: Cannot run this command, since there was a RestartGame command already queued to run in "room30.asc", line 15

Other than that, there are few minor mistakes here and there, which I did not write down. Mostly typos and missing responses on non important hotspots.
From what I remember:

Spoiler

- When placing items on a pillar (where you need to place magic orb), if you place a wrong item the game displays incorrectly formatted string with "%s" unfilled.
- Close to the end, in one of the generic rooms there's an item on the floor, that sais "loaf of bread", but when you take it it appears to be a "cured fish" in inventory.
- The biggest screw up was when I found Daeron in prison, but did not have a magical rod to save him. And the room does not provide a hotspot for going back, so I had to reload. I don't know if this is intentional, but Daeron hints you that manuscript can open doors, so it feels like you should be able to use that hint and go back to open door to the wizard's workshop.

[close]

[Shadow1000]

Spoiler

- When placing items on a pillar (where you need to place magic orb), if you place a wrong item the game displays incorrectly formatted string with "%s" unfilled.
- Close to the end, in one of the generic rooms there's an item on the floor, that sais "loaf of bread", but when you take it it appears to be a "cured fish" in inventory.
- The biggest screw up was when I found Daeron in prison, but did not have a magical rod to save him. And the room does not provide a hotspot for going back, so I had to reload. I don't know if this is intentional, but Daeron hints you that manuscript can open doors, so it feels like you should be able to use that hint and go back to open door to the wizard's workshop.

[close]

I actually got

Spoiler

as far as Dearon in prison. I gave him the cloak. I don't know where the manuscript or wizard's workshop are. I must have missed something!

[close]

Thanks

[Crimson Wizard]

I don't know if forum rules allow me to give hints in this thread, but
@Shadow1000

Spoiler

IIRC the manuscript was in one of the bookshelves, I just kept clicking around them. And workshop is the small locked door, not far away from the prison.

[close]

[Shadow1000]

I don't know if forum rules allow me to give hints in this thread, but
@Shadow1000

Spoiler

IIRC the manuscript was in one of the bookshelves, I just kept clicking around them. And workshop is the small locked door, not far away from the prison.

[close]

Ok I'll move the questions to the hints thread

[Shadow1000]

Ok so I finished the game with a few hints.

Some thoughts:

The lo-res made it REALLY hard to identify objects, so having marked hotspots are especially important.

Spoiler

I don't think there was one on the ladder

[close]

As Crimson Wizard pointed out, it's ok to have the death traps but it should give you the ability to restore a save rather than ab-end. One ab-end didn't even let me start again; I had to replace the game files from the original zip folder.

As far as the bread/fish, I assumed that was a reference to the story where Jesus turns loaves into a fish 

As far as the gameplay, I will hold off commenting because I assume that as a remake of the 93 original, any pros or cons are straight from the original so this is not the right place to comment.

Overall, good effort. If you do it again, I'd probably suggest making the resolution slightly higher. There was a LOT of clicking around to find things because pixelated items just blended with the pixelated background.

[arj0n]

BTW being killed with a death trap causes another bug

Thanx for the feedback!
I've fixed the bugs you've mentioned.
As for the prison exit: there is a exit in this room, but it is in the corner. I've replaced it now to the centre bottom like all the rooms have.

v1.2 is uploaded.

• Being killed with a death trap causes a bug with RestartGame
• When placing wrong item item on pilar gives incorrectly formatted string with "%s" unfilled in response.
• item on the floor with wrong description "loaf of bread" corrected.
• Changed: the exit in the prison, since it was in the corner and therefor apperantly not visible enough.

[arj0n]

Ok so I finished the game with a few hints.

Hope you liked it

Some thoughts:

The lo-res made it REALLY hard to identify objects, so having marked hotspots are especially important.

Spoiler

I don't think there was one on the ladder

[close]

Yep, that one is fixed now.

As Crimson Wizard pointed out, it's ok to have the death traps but it should give you the ability to restore a save rather than ab-end. One ab-end didn't even let me start again; I had to replace the game files from the original zip folder.

After you died, the game restarts and ends up in the intro menu, from where you can load a save game...

As far as the bread/fish, I assumed that was a reference to the story where Jesus turns loaves into a fish 

Nah, it was just a typo

As far as the gameplay, I will hold off commenting because I assume that as a remake of the 93 original, any pros or cons are straight from the original so this is not the right place to comment.

Yes, most pros and cons come with the remake, although some cons have been dropped.
The original game suffers from 2 major bugs for example.

Overall, good effort. If you do it again, I'd probably suggest making the resolution slightly higher. There was a LOT of clicking around to find things because pixelated items just blended with the pixelated background.

I don't think I will do such remake again, maybe finish the ones I've shelved though.
For now I'm back at my LSL1 (AGI/EGA) remake project which was shelved for many years.

[Shadow1000]

Ok so I finished the game with a few hints.

Hope you liked it

Overall, pretty good! I never saw the original although I did play quite a few lo-res games on the C64, Apple IIE and Amiga in the pre-windows era. These games were in the mid to late 80s (ok, I'm old). 1993 was the year that the original Doom came out and the graphics were far superior to Barahir (assuming your remake was comparable to the original)

One example:

Spoiler

I found the wand, used it as needed and ended up dead. When I reloaded from my last save, I didn't have it anymore. I couldn't remember WHERE I found it but I literally pixel-hunted every room to find it again because it really didn't stand out in any way

[close]

Have fun with the LSL1 remake. I remember that back from when I was in high school...

[Crimson Wizard]

For now I'm back at my LSL1 (AGI/EGA) remake project which was shelved for many years.

Ah, I remember testing this, and was wondering what happened to it.

[arj0n]

Overall, pretty good! I never saw the original although I did play quite a few lo-res games on the C64, Apple IIE and Amiga in the pre-windows era. These games were in the mid to late 80s (ok, I'm old). 1993 was the year that the original Doom came out and the graphics were far superior to Barahir (assuming your remake was comparable to the original)

Yes, besides it has some additional graphics, they are almost the same compared to the original game.
They have been blown up 200% through.
And yes, I'm old too, as my childhood games where from mid and late 80's.

One example:

Spoiler

I found the wand, used it as needed and ended up dead. When I reloaded from my last save, I didn't have it anymore. I couldn't remember WHERE I found it but I literally pixel-hunted every room to find it again because it really didn't stand out in any way

[close]

That's precisely why I added a bar with a label that shows object/hotspot names plus extra's like inventory item names, etc.

Have fun with the LSL1 remake. I remember that back from when I was in high school...

Thanx!

For now I'm back at my LSL1 (AGI/EGA) remake project which was shelved for many years.

Ah, I remember testing this, and was wondering what happened to it.

I do remember that, I guess that was around 2012?
I decided to rewrite it completely, the coding was a bit too... messy