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Map Gab / Re: SilverSword - Incedibly obscure Macintosh game from 1998

« on: October 03, 2018, 07:59:20 pm »

I've formatted the maps, adding in the NPC dialogue and boss pictures for the relevant stages.  I want to do another pass to make sure all of the maps are included and in order.  By my count there are some 8 stages, each with 4 to 8 sub-stages, 53 maps in total.  I mean to include the "Game Map" that appears whenever you leave a town.  Here are two maps as a preview:





And here is the game map.  In the game, line paths are overlaid to show where the next stage goes:



I (with some help) uploaded an image of the game itself to Macintosh Garden.  The game is a little tricky to emulate, and on my modern windows machine I haven't gotten the music to work correctly, but it's been enough to get screenshots of gameplay.  If I can find the time I'll try and see how it can run on other machines and setups.

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Map Gab / SilverSword - Incredibly obscure Macintosh game from 1998

« on: September 25, 2018, 05:49:05 pm »

A side project of mine has been getting an old Macintosh game I wrote in high school in 1998, named SilverSword, up and running in emulation.  No relation to other games named Silversword-This was a platformer, not unlike Castlevania, and ended up being a shareware game that few played and no one bought, but I was relatively proud of the product nonetheless. Rough edges notwithstanding, I learned quite a bit while making it, and it's a sizeable game with around 40-50 stages, several bosses, music, save capability, all from a kid learning C++ and the quirks of the Macintosh OS.



While I was looking at the game again I wrote a small script to extract and build screenshot maps of each of the stages.  The game was built in my spare time while I was a student, and I managed to get some interesting levels made as I finished it.

Here is a sample of one of the later levels:



There are vertical and horizontal stages, and within each type they're all the same size.  There's usually 5 stages, give or take, followed by a boss, with 8 bosses.  

I need to do some cleanup on the screenshot map files, but I figured this might be a good place to post them.  Barring a time machine set to 1998, the game itself is not currently available to play, by emulation or otherwise, although I'm working on getting a version online again.  I sincerely doubt anyone else has a copy of the demo that I posted on AOL decades ago (although I would be pleasantly surprised if someone did!)  It would also feel really weird to have this game be one of the first Macintosh exclusive games to be on VGMaps, since virtually no one has played it.  Most of the other game maps listed under "Macintosh" are shared by other platforms.