This article is part of a series exploring the reverse engineered inner workings of Downland, a game for the Tandy Color Computer, released in 1983, written by Michael Aichlmayr.
Every room in Downland has five “pickups”, which are treasures that the player can collect for points or to unlock doors. At game start up, the list of pickups per room is generated. The first two items in a room’s list of five are keys that open doors. There’s a data table that determines which key opens which door. When the player completes the game once, the data table is switched to another one with different key-door mappings. I marked it as the “hard mode” version but I don’t know if it’s actually more difficult. The last three items per room are treasures, randomly chosen between the money bag and the diamond.
Fun fact: I only realized last week when looking at a speed run on YouTube that you don’t need to collect all the keys to finish the game. Maybe one day I’ll use that information to become the Downland speed running champion.
Each type of pickup has a base score:
- Key: 200 points
- Money bag: 300 points
- Diamond: 400 points
When the player collects them, the game gives the player the base score and an additional random amount between 0 and 127. The random number is taken from a counter that runs through the cartridge rom area from addresses 0xc000 to 0xdf5a. It takes the value at the current address and gets the first seven bits. Other processes advance the counter so it’s reasonably random. Random-ish.
The randomness of the pickups generated and the score added makes it so that getting a high score is partially outside of the player’s control. I’m still unsure if this is was a good idea. A great run could wind up with a bad score, which would be disappointing. I don’t know what I’d replace it with, though!
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