Nuclear Waste Dump

Nuclear Waste Dump begun its life when Penta was still in the works, back in 2004. I was bored with the current Penta coding and didn't want to do work on this. Instead I was looking for a small intermediate project to pursue. While surfing the Atari Magazines archive, I stumbled upon an old typein for the 8bit range. It quickly prooved to be an interesting concept after reading - and very easy to convert as it didn't require large amounts of sprites to be moved. So I sat down and started to code.

The basic concept and code was quickly resolved and I had an alpha version running after 2 or 3 days of coding. However it did feel ugly, lacked graphics and sound but it was a good upcoming game. And finally it wasn't complete true to the old typein. But at that point I decided not to go through that at all. Taking what semeed sound and leaving out some little features. Mainly the bouncing of the barrels to the sides. After playing around with a test version it didn't feel too natural so I decided to have mroe natural straight drops only.

Talk within the crew lead to a point where we did agree to pursue the idea further. Aldn, back then still a member, offered to take care for digisound effects. As you can hear in the released game, he did a marvelous job. Actually the digi effects were in place, long before there was any other music or graphics.

ST Survivor gave up his graphics work shortly after finishing Penta and he never submitted any artwork for Nuclear Waste Dump. He was involved though and all ideas for the extra barrels were triggered in discussion with him.

We were already in 2005 then and Penta was long out. Pooz was a hot item and we needed another release. At that point it was clear, Nuclear Waste Dump was going to become the next Paradize game. Marcer helped me alot to get new motivation on that project and he quickly submitted some nice musics. Crazy Q also offered a tune and I featured it ofcourse. So we music and digie effects but graphics were still lacking.

Minz, our new graphics man, jumped in and took Nuclear Waste Dump as his final proof that he could do it. It took a long time, more than 6 months but in the end he delivered a big pack of sprites and graphics as well as some ideass. For example the asymmetric dumpster with its faint powerplant backdrop was entirely the idea of Minz. It required me to rework my code a bit but it was rather quickly implemented and directly improved the atmosphere of the game a lot.

With all things in place, we had something of a cool product. I was astonished that my small in-between game made it to a full release with quality artwork in all aspects. The game actually lacked a proper ending but thinking about the main plot, you are already at the edge of an apocalypse so can only opt to race against the time. A race when you will make the final mistake sooner or later. This will eradicate all. There is no hope, just too much waste to sort away. So in the end, all you can hope for is delaying the final clash.

I'm very satisfied with the end result, and even if it could be expanded in a few aspects, I won't work on this anymore. Planned as an intermediate project with a timeslot of maybe 2 months, it ended up taking 2 years to complete. While the result is really good, it also shows that these days you simply cannot pursue big game projects on the ST if you cannot devote all your time on ST coding. After all, I had to go on with my studies back then, and I did.

This was meant as a small but addictive VCS styled game. And I'm utterly pleased to say: GOAL ACHIEVED