The Computer Works - Space Intrigue

Space Intrigue was going to be a 16 color PCjr exclusive follow up to my PC BASIC graphic adventure Secret Quest: 2010 (which was limited to CGA's 4 color palette). I created several images for it before abandoning the project due to lack of time.

Space Intrigue: Chapter 1 - The Story

"Once again, you, secret agent James T. Bod, have made a spectacular narrow escape from an exploding star cruiser. But before you have a chance to change the course of your shuttlecraft, you realize you are ensnared in a tractor beam and your shuttle is being pulled toward a strange alien spacecraft... ...and the ship does not look friendly."

Space Intrigue: Chapter 1 - The Game

After the prologue, your character blacks out and eventually awakens in a small cell aboard what you eventually discover is a very Trek-like star cruiser...not unlike ships I was concurrently designing for my Take-1 epic space adventure, Star Voyagers: 3000. This would be my first and only attempt to create a font using an array of graphics for a PCjr BASIC game. Using the system font on a 160x200x16 color screen, one is limited to only 20 characters across...which would have severely limited my descriptions. A subroutine converted strings into the sequence of commands that actually displaying the graphic font...and it did so with a delay per character so the text appeared to type on screen (as was popular in many sci-fi films from the 70's and 80's).

Space Intrigue: Chapter 1 - Assorted Images #1

Had I had time to work on the game, these are some of the images that would have been used within the viewer depicted on the previous screen. Since this was to be largely a text-based adventure, the images could not take up much real estate (which also meant they wouldn't take up much space on disk...and I could create them fairly quickly). Navigation was screen relative...west was left, north was forward, east was right, south was back. The guard's mess hall was located directly east of the cell, across a hallway.

Space Intrigue: Chapter 1 - Assorted Images #2

Since I was trying to simulate 3D movement, if the player moves south in the hall after escaping the cell, he should still see the door at the end of the hall. Look at the bottom-left panel while fllipping between "Assorted Images #1" and "Assorted Images #2" to see what I was going for. I had laid out the hallway graphics in such a way that it was easy for me to modify the image slightly to make a really long hall (as was seen in games like Wizardry and Bard's Tale).

Space Intrigue: Chapter 1 - Assorted Images #3

Some rooms, like warp engineering, would be several screens large. I am not sure why I created the in-game car ad. Throughout high school, I drew sketches of a Ferrari-inspired car design I called the "Iwasaki Intrigue". The name? I obviously took inspiration from Data, who often found things "intriguing" on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I started creating this game shortly after the TV series debuted.