Scenario

The Sorceress Hecatia has been hired to locate and banish the dreaded and mighty warlock Lycurgus.

Lycurgus' hideout is a dangerous dungeon filled with deadly traps and blood-thirsty creatures... Fortunately, the nine Black Lamps will cast light on the path.

Will you help sorceress Hecatia find and defeat warlock Lycurgus?

Gameplay

The main goal of the game is to lead sorceress Hecatia through the dungeon, collecting the nine Black Lamps and ultimately fighting warlock Lycurgus.

A secondary goal is to collect keys and unlock the ten treasure chests where Lycurgus keeps his riches, as they will be Hecatia's reward for her quest.

Besides walking and jumping, Hecatia can perform three types of actions:

1. If she isn't carrying anything and there's a object in front of her that she can carry (a chair, a barrel...), she will pick it up.
2. If she's carrying an object, she will drop it in front of her. Towers of objects can be built by carefully piling them up on each other.
3. If she's neither carrying anything or in front of an object, she'll shoot a magic spell that can stun several enemies for a couple of seconds.

Besides Lycurgus, the dungeon is plagued by several types of menaces, whose touch drains Hecatia's life energy:

1. The Green Imp never stops walking, obstacles make it turn left or right.
2. The White Ghost flies in straight lines and turns back on impact.
3. The Slime Blob bounces at random, sometimes diagonally, sometimes twice as fast.
4. The Dragon Trophy is mounted on walls and cannot move, but it periodically shoots fireballs.
5. The Red Cobra tries to follow and attack the player, but isn't very intelligent, and is vulnerable to magic.
6. The Dog Soldier also follows the player, but is more likely to dodge obstacles, although he can also be hit by magic.

The Black Lamps and the keys can be collected by simply touching them; picking a Black Lamp up also replenishes the player's energy. The treasure chests, however, cannot be unlocked unless the player has found enough keys to open them.

Lycurgus can only be fought after the nine Black Lamps have been collected.

Game Controls

Normal joystick movements apply.
Use fire button 1 for action.
Use fire button 2 to jump.

P - Pause, ESCAPE - Quit

Note: The isometric tri-dimensional perspective means that the top right corner of the screen is the North, rather than the top border.

All controls but Pause and Quit can be redefined from the game menu.

Loading

Tape:
Press CTRL-ENTER.

Disc:
RUN"DISC (ENTER)

Game Credits

Written by César Nicolás González ("CNGSOFT"), who programmed the code, drew the graphics, wrote the sound and designed the map. The friendly and talented DracuOfTheFuture drew and painted the cover art, to my eternal gratitude.

The assembler used to compile this game is AS80 by Frank A. Kingswood.

The sources of inspiration for this game are many, besides the obvious nod to Ultimate's mythically unreleased "Mire Mare" and the guest stars from Dinamic's Camelot Warriors (the green imp, the white ghost and the television set... oops, that's a spoiler, isn't it?) but they can be summarised as follows:

1. Rémi Herbulot and Michel Rho for their isometric 3D games published under Ere Software: their "Crafton & Xunk" (also known as "Get Dexter") stays the main technical inspiration for this game.
2. Emilio Martínez for developing the multicolour font renderer used by the games from Topo Soft: "Hire Hare" uses a similar method to render text.
3. Hugh Binns for creating the proportional cursive font from Hewson's "Stormlord", whose style inspired this game's own cursive font.
4. Tim Follin for his musical soundtrack from Firebird Software's "Black Lamp": a basic cover of it plays during the gameplay, and its lamps are also this game's McGuffin.
5. Fred Gray for his songs and jingles from Denton Design's "Fox Fights Back": covers of several short jingles play here as well.

Special mentions go to Gargoyle Games' Dun Darach, whose maze inspired the one in Hire Hare, and The Edge's Inside Outing whose depth this game wished it could reach. Sadly, Hire Hare was developed during difficult personal circumstances in the tiny timespan of 35 days, and the isometric 3D engine (codenamed "Petiso3D") took almost three weeks to write, so everything else had to be extremely rushed. As soon as everything calms down, the author promises to polish every rough edge.

Finally, I must thank the organisation and the audience of CPC RetroDev 2016 for making possible this odyssey where Past, Present and Future join their forces briefly but happily.