Yeah green text on a green background is what I associate with vintage computing

This year it was a much less spooky affair

Essentially, its a tech demo for the new game, but since Astra Protocol was such a quick game to build (I made it in three months at the start of lockdown) it seemed a good place to start.

The biggest downside is that it no longer fits on a floppy disk - but I want to keep the dot matrix support

So while Astra Protocol 2 had the bigger impact, it all started due to the game released five years ago today.

Happy Fifth Birthday Astra Protocol.

#indiegame

I the game, and and interview with me, even appeared in-print in the magazine Pixel Addict.

Astra Protocol 2 had a much bigger impact than its predecessor (releasing on Steam and marketing the game a little helped with that). It enabled me to go demo the game live at the likes of the Yorkshire Games Festival and EGX and I appeared on two podcasts to talk about it.

But with such a short development cycle and simple concept, there was room for expansion - many ideas didn't make it into Astra Protocol (such as the homing missiles) so I was left with a concept of a game and a whole load more to add - which led to me releasing Astra Protocol 2 a few years later.

Only taking three months to release (and a big chunk of that being taken trying to implement homing missiles) meant that the game was quite simple, but it was also very lightweight - the game came in at around 500 kB, so it would easily fit on a floppy disk and had very few external dependencies.

The concept was quite straightforward. My lack of artistic ability meant I wanted to try and stick to something which involved simple geometric shapes, this then slowly evolved to become something inspired by the Amstrad CPC I had when I was younger.

If you've got a need for viewing scanned forms or images (it doesn't have to be in a laboratory!) give it a look and let me know what you think and whether there should be any more time invested in this small project.

#programming #coding #laboratory #software #scanning