Introduction
“Castle Dain is a mini-RPG game for the Apple II computer programmed entirely in assembly language. Nothing flashy — just pretend you’re playing this in the early 1980’s.
The game is fairly intuitive. You pick one of 4 characters, and fight from 20 different types of monsters in turn-based combat. The castle has 5 levels; some with puzzles to solve. However, each floor has a locked door blocking the stairwell to the next level. Therefore you need to find the key to continue on.
When you win a battle, you earn experience points that are used immediately to boost your attributes: Strength (battle strength), Dexterity (defense), Vitality (your life/hit points), and Max Vitality (which sets a limit on your Vitality). Possible treasures may include a potion (healing), scroll (magic missile), or amulet (protection). It is important to read the descriptions in the rooms to know where you may need to travel to next.
There is a definite ending to the game: confronting and defeating the evil wizard. (One of the many tropes you encounter in the game.) There is also a save option when you exit through the front of the castle.
A short “game trailer” can be found here:
Background
My family owned an Apple II when I was a teenager back in the 1980’s. Although I attempted a little BASIC programming at that time, assembly programming seemed too complex for me to understand. Fast forward to 2020. It was on my bucket list to learn assembly, and the lockdown gave me plenty of time to figure things out. Luckily my brother gifted me the Assembly Lines book (written by Roger Wagner) the year before. Castle Dain is loosely based on a small BASIC program that my childhood friend Steve and I worked on back when we were teens. I took inspiration from a lot of places. In regard to the title page, the castle is similar to Old Main from my alma mater EIU, and the clouds are from the Conan: Hall of Volta (Apple II) game. Visuals of the actual game are loosely based on Wizardry IV (Apple II); the gameplay is loosely based on Dragonstomper (Atari 2600). Other influences include Adventure (Atari 2600), Dungeon Campaign (Apple II), and Dungeon! (Apple II).
Obviously the music heard in the background of the YouTube video does not appear in the game. (See footnote at bottom.) However, I do have some basic sound effects and two brief songs created with Paul Lutus’s Electric Duet program: “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and “Rule Britannia.” The sketch drawings that appear in the video are from Zuhdise who offers his artistic services on the Fiverr app.
As I was slowly working on this from 2020 to 2023, I was providing updates on my progress whenever possible. I was encouraged by much positive feedback on the project. Thank you to all of you who let me know that you enjoyed the game. The Apple II community really is great group of people to interact with. Thanks again for your support.
Controls
The controls for the game are actually straight forward, making Castle Dain easy to play for just about any level of user.
Selecting the Joystick is as simple as pushing the fire button or Button 0 on the Apple II (Open-Apple on the Keyboard).
If you are using the Keyboard to control the game then you will need to press the K key to begin the game. From there, there directional keys are as follows
W – Move Up
A – Move Left
D – Move Right
S – Move Down
The arrow keys will control the selectors within the menus.
The Return key is the item selector key while the space bar is the Camp control key. Using this key, you can bring up the option menu during the movement of the character around the screen.
First Play Through
Well, we went ahead and played the game in house here at the A.P.P.L.E. office.. Running the game on the Virtual II emulator on the Macintosh, we found the game start up to be a perfect old school startup that takes users back to the early days of the Apple II. After selecting the Keyboard as the controller with the K key, We went about trying to conquer the game. We definitely like the ease of use in the menus and the key control within the game.
As the game introduction loaded, we found it to be the perfect blend of old school graphics and the music just fit right in with what was on the screen.
Exploring the castle, we found that the number of attacks were coming quick and heavy, particularly from the Green Slime, which is quite aggressive and capable of destroying the player in short order. The first time we played the game, the player was killed off after a mere 4 battles with the Green Slime. Of course, having delved into the game without perusing the pre-requisite video and information, we didn’t realize at the time that there were a few keys to the game to longevity and becoming the ultimate warrior within the game. These keys soon became rather important as we were not having any luck with our battles and survivability prior to watching and learning a bit about the game.
Be forewarned, you will need to not only increase your strength and dexterity as you go through, you will also need to increase you max vitality and then do the basic things to keep said vitality up to snuff. Failure to do so will definitely result in your player being killed off by the attacking monsters.
Each level of the game is a puzzle in itself that must be solved in order to get to the next level. As we worked through each one, we went through a lot of trial and error, finally figuring out some of the things by happenstance or luck. This type of by the seat of the pants type playing allows one to experience the old school gaming of learning about the game as you go. On and on we went, accomplishing each puzzle bit by bit, gaining strength, losing fewer vitality points as we went and then finally getting to the higher levels of the game, , eventually rescuing the King and Shlena, and then to the grand battles of the final stages of the game.
This is a very good game and is quite the accomplishment for Frank. His work over the past year has allowed him to produce a very fine single 140K disk based Apple II game that will definitely challenge even the most experienced RPG players.
While my first foray was quit anti-climatic, the second run through not only gave me a full on challenge but took about 90 minutes to complete. This first RPG game by Frank has left us looking forward to what he does next!
You can download the game from here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UUefBUPvRxFGFic_aBEPJaJYh414xWoh
