The Commodore 64 is old enough to make almost everything absolutely impossible to do... until you get the right idea. Many of those "right ideas" have been thoroughly documented through the years, and my fingers have been itching for a long time to try them out. I never did any coding in the 80s but stuck to the music and graphics side. Now was the time.

I chose LIMBO for several reasons. Mainly because I got the "right idea" of a way to represent any 9-color 80x50 pixel image using 128 characters. As long as the picture was blurry enough. The LIMBO backgrounds fitted that purpose perfectly.

Another reason was the fact that the single-color nature of LIMBO would translate well to the Commodore 64's more hires single color sprite mode. And the stark silhuettes makes cheating excpetionally easy.

And then, I know quite a bit about LIMBO since I was part of the team that did the original.


WHAT I AM PROUD ABOUT IN THIS DEMO:
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THE ROPE.

I actually did not think I would be able to pull that off. It IS actually "physics based" - but obviously with extremely simple and hacked "physics". The rope consists of 8 1-dimensional springs below each other, a very hacked velocity-feedback from the spring above, A table lookup to shorten the rope on the y-axis when the bottom moves to the side, AND pieces of hacked and weird math that even I don't really know what does any more.

THE SURFACE.

The surface is coded as a height map, built from a small selection of predefined building blocks. Without any added details, each screen is then set up using only 5 bytes. Custom areas can be painted and sprites can be placed for more details. In average with the level of detail shown here, about 20-50 bytes will be needed per screen. That should give me room for at least 100 screens of gameplay - about 10 minutes if you never stop to solve puzzles.

I have reserved 41 bytes in the character set to show the graphics for the top of the ground surface across the screen. I dynamically merge the surface into the background graphics in these unique characters, to make it look good, even when the ground is not aligned to an 8-pixel grid.

SPRITE MIRRORING

This is a small thing, but mirroring the boy-sprites on the fly (something the Commodore 64 unfortunately can NOT do in hardware) saves a LOT of memory and is absolutely necessary to have enough sprites available for smooth animation.

BOY PHYSICS

Most commodore 64 games suffer from a really clunky control (in my opinion). I actaully think I got the boy controls quite accurate. My friend and colleage Martin Fasterholdt once made an in depth scientific analysis of the jump-timings of LIMBO - that was hugely useful. ([ Ссылка ])


WHAT'S THE PLAN:
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I am not in the process of making a full game. I am doing this solely for my own satisfaction. But as long as I am having fun here is a wish-list of what I would love to put in (and have a realistic chance of actually doing)

The Spider (obviously)
That also means: Bear traps.
AND pushing/pulling bear traps
So why not: Pushing and pulling boxes.
And if I have a box, I almost have the boat.
That is... If I make some water. So Yes... Water
also:
The Hotel sign puzzle
Ladders
blood "particle-systems"
The weather machine puzzle
The last reverse-gravity-puzzle
The ending - still with no explanation
Oh, yes. Sound effects and music (obviously)
And whatever other puzzels I find interesting.

I would LOVE to have a disc-streaming version, but I don't have any wish to actually CODE one, so that won't happen - unless you are a demo-coder that does disc-streaming for breakfast, and have actually read all the way down here. Then please write me :-). If you don't the hope is to eventually end up with a 10-15 minutes LIMBO-experience.

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