Shamus_The Shadow Case___________________________________________________

SHAMUS
- The Shadow Case -

Release Date : 07 . 03 . 2003

an UNDERWARE.DESIGN production for the
DARKBASIC RETRO COMPO
(c) 2003

//. STORY

The World is under great danger : an Evil Techlord, called 'the SHADOW', is threatening the entire human race.
Controlling an Ancient Mystical force, his goals are simple. Rule the world, destroy humanity, and be the king of his own
cybernetic empire.
But one man, the well-known Cyber Bounty Hunter SHAMUS, stands on his way.
With enough will to fight hords of evil Drones & Bots, Shamus mission is to get through SHADOW's base, find and terminate him.

Will you help SHAMUS in his dangerous mission ?

//. CONTROLS

Use the LEFT & RIGHT arrows on your keyboard, to ROTATE SHAMUS.

Use the UP & DOWN arrows to move FORWARD or BACKWARD.

Press the CTRL key to fire.

Grab the 'HEART' object to gain life points.

Lit up the restart pole, to restart from this position, if you get killed.

To complete the level, you have to find 2 items : the KEY and the LOCK item.
Once you have found these two artefacts, the level exit will open, and you can then proceed to the next level.

//. DEV. INFOS

Within a 2 weeks development time, this is what came up of our vision of SHAMUS.

Developped using Darkbasic classic, our goal was to bring some great playability to the game, and the best out of DB !
Porting and assembling several software libs, Kevin PICONE managed to get an amazing game engine, including :

- Scrolling environment
- Sliding angled 3D collision, thanks to a Spatial Map Partitioning system
- Real time Inter object collision and partitioning
- Medium AI implementation
- Respawn points
- High number of screen objects, thanks to an Object Partitioning system

All this combined with original gfx, musics and objects, makes Shamus, quite a complete game framework ( well, at least, we hope so ! )

While being a 3D version, we tried to stick as close as possible of the original SHAMUS game, that first came out on the VIC-20 computer.
Other versions were also available for C64 and PC, and later on Gameboy color.
SYNAPSE SOFTWARE, the makers of 'SHAMUS', are also responsible of several 8-bit hit games, like ZAXXON, BLUEMAX, PHARAOH's CURSE
and NECROMANCER.

The original atari version can be found here : http://home.bip.net/magnus.welander/actionadv/actionadv.html
Original game screens can be seen here : http://screenmania.retrogames.com/c64/02/c64_0043.html

.original 1983 pc version cover