Paulina's Potions
A downloadable Amstrad-CPC-game
The Story
Paulina Calderón is a friendly witch with two passions: Brewing magic potions and Retrocomputing. And she just found out that at a garage sale just around the corner, someone sells the very last CPC 646 that was produced in 1993. Help her to buy this precious antiquity!
How to play
First, find out where the CPC is sold and how much it costs. Then discover the world around you and collect the diamonds to pay with. Find your way through medieval castles, eerie caves, burning suburbs and heavenly temples. Fight against wild beasts (they might look cute but they are all killers) and use them and other ingredients for your magic potions. You will need these potions to overcome dangers and barriers and make your way to new regions of the world. (Detailed explanation in the PDF manual)
Game controls
Use the arrow keys, a joystick or, best on a real CPC464, the bottom right keys of the numpad ("0" left, "." down, ENTER right and "2" up). Press Fire 1 or the space bar to pick up/put down items and select in the menu. Press Fire 2 or CONTROL to enter and quit the menu.
Gestures
The element of potion brewing and also Paulinas last name are a reference to "Super Cauldron". The quest to buy the last CPC produced commemorates the end of CPCs commercial lifespan.
Color Flipping
This game uses a technique called color flipping. It's played best with a real CRT and sunglasses on (no joke!) – or in an emulator like RVM where you should turn "Interlaced blending" to the maximum. WARNING: If you are sensitive to blinking lights, this might not be the game for you. ON THE BRIGHT SIDE: This technique allows up to 16 colors in Mode 1, and colors you might have never seen before on a CPC!
Author and license
Code, graphics and music by Leonard Eröd, (alias arnOLdE)
Title screen by Brundij
This game is licensed with the MIT license (https://mit-license.org)
Software used:
- https://atom.io/ for coding
- http://www.winape.net for assembling, testing & debugging
- https://www.mapeditor.org Tiled map editor for stage desing
- https://www.gimp.org for editing the Tiled tileset and the title screen
- http://www.julien-nevo.com/arkostracker/ for music
- https://sourceforge.net/projects/javacpc/ for building the cdt file
- https://www.retrovirtualmachine.org/en/ for testing, screenshots & video
Third party code included:
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Bug free (?) final versionNov 20, 2023
Comments
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I'm very impressed by the game and especially the music! I'm glad my software is so well used :).
Do you think you could send me the music files so that I can record them for the CPC radio? I could record them from the games but I'm not sure I would find all of them; the game is pretty hard :).
Thank you, that's a big honour! Your software is amazing and I'd be glad to be featured in CPC radio. I'll send you the files to your website mail address.
Good game and excellent music, thank you. I also added it to my new Amstrad CPC gameplay video.
Thank you for playing!
Great 1
Very nice adventure game, even if it's still not bug free (see review). Our German-language review can be found in our recorded livestream starting at 03:44:12. Subscription to our YouTube or Twitch channel is welcome. 🙂
I enjoyed the system of collecting materials and exploring ways to proceed through repeated trial and error, as if I were playing an ancient game.
Perhaps I would have to repeat trial and error for more than ten hours to solve this game on my own!
But I used the bug where diamonds remain after game over and saved up 300 diamonds,meow!
凄い!
にゃー！
Hi Leosoft, I tried to play it on a real cpc 6128, french keyboard but I cannot get past the loading screen. I press Space key several times but it doesn't wotk. Can you patch it so we pass the loading screem pressing any key or after 10 seconds?
Same happened to me
very good
Thank you!
Awesome game, congrats!!
Thank you for the screenshot, glad to see it works on the plus monitors!
Nice game!
Thank you for playing! I fixed the error in the tilemap, you can't get stuck here anymore...
But next time, try exiting the castle via the roof ;-)
The bug still exists, at least in the floppy version (tested with WinAPE 2.0 Beta 2).
Bleibt Ihr da tatsächlich noch "in der Mauer" stecken? (Würde mich über einen Screenshot freuen)
Wir haben das Spiel am Samstagabend im Livestream (Link, siehe Profil). Da kannst Du es dann evtl. live sehen. Anonsten später im MItschnitt.