Santa's Littlest Helper

Hi, Santa's Littlest Helper is a Christmas experience, I created with my 8 bit isometric game engine written in NextBASIC.

I wrote the engine 4 years ago, but I've been busy writing a GUI framework to build design tools. Creating games might be cool, but I want to empower people to create worlds!

Please download to a PC (or Mac/Linux, etc), and unzip. This will create a big folder structure containing MBs of renderings that enable the real time performance. Then copy the whole lot onto your Next SD card. 

You should then be able to boot your Next and run it by clicking on the SatasLH.run folder. If not, run the SantasLH.bas file.

You basically have to collect the gifts from wherever they fell. There are 48 in total, enough to fill both margins with two stacks each. If you get stuck, press space or fire to throw a lucky snowball in the direction of a nearby gift.

Have fun, and please do let me know what you think - ideally in the Spectrum Next or Basic on the Spectrum Next groups in Facebook. If itch.io has likes a like would be nice too.

This is my first released game, so I hope you like it. Merry Christmas!

Tips:

This is an isometric game. Imagine an isometric chessboard on the ground. Up, down, left, right move you in that direction on the screen, which is diagonally across the chess board, like a bishop. You can combine keys to move in all 8 directions, and sometimes a little side step may be required to get in just the right place. You may find this particularly helpful to bear in mind if you keep walking past a gift or can't line up on a tree.

To climb a tree push into it. You'll stop when there is something above you, but you just need to step left or right (relative to the direction you are facing) to climb onto an adjacent branch and then continue up until the next branch. Sometimes you'll have to hold the side direction for a little longer to get him to jump off and hold it long enough for him to climb up onto the next branch.

The game has assists to help you move diagonally without an initial misstep so moving in simple one key directions may have a slight delay. It also has assists to make it harder to fall from high places so if you need to jump, you may have to hold the key(s) a little longer, before he moves.

You can glide as you fall. Try not to glide out of the play area. I don't think you can, but if you do, it's not as much fun as you might think. If you get lost under trees or shrubbery just wander about a bit.