Here's Link and a Wizard
The great game for the Nintendo Entertainment System has to be Legend of Zelda. The design of this game is so brilliant that it doesn't rely on eyecandy to be successful, but rather it focusses on exploration, discovery, challenging combat, interesting characters, improving your player (Link) and a storyline. Ordinary games can become tedious after a few hours, but Zelda stays fresh after hundreds of hours.
So it seemed natural that a game of this type should appear on the Commodore 64, but for whatever reason (fear of a Nintendo lawsuit?) a clone of the game never made it. So I decided to try my hand at a Gamemaker conversion. First, I needed to create the characters.
Here's Link and a Wizard
The sprites for the Commodore 64 and Nintendo are remarkably similar. For the most part they seem to have the same number of colors and a similar resolution. As you can see by the empty space above and below the characters they could have even been taller for the c64, but that would throw out the proportions.
One of the grunts who throws spears and a water monster that pops its head out and shoots fire balls.
And old man and an old woman, useful for giving information.
A merchant for buying goods and a fairy for restoring health.
It is easy to make characters move in Zelda since all movements are quite basic. The henchman above just moves in 4 directions, somewhat randomly, and if he is facing Link he lets a spear fly. Link is also easy to move, since he too moves in only 4 directions, and pressing a button causes him to attack with his weapon (either a sword or flying weapon).
In the original Zelda game there were hundreds of screens, each different. Some formed mazes that you had to map out, others had just a small pool of water in the center. It would be necessary for the game to draw each screen out of tiles. Each tile graphic would be stored in a data set, allowing for lots of different looking terrains. This would potentially take a lot of memory - something Gamemaker doesn't have in abundance.
It also turns out that Gamemaker draws pixels very slowly. To draw the screen above took just under 30 seconds. With players jumping from screen to screen, a 30 second delay each time would cause them to quickly tire of the game.
This is one game where disk access by GKGM would really help out a lot. Without the possibility of finishing a decent representation of Zelda I decided not to go on.
Download Zelda (unfinished)