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NUMBERTRON
Numbertron is Joachim Froholt's second game for the Sharp MZ. This clever and cunning puzzle game will have you addicted for hours as you try and get the highest possible score and clear as much of the screen as possible. Be careful to avoid the trail of space left behind you but all is not lost, collect the bonus clover to fill some of the spaces up again. Plan your moves carefully as you will move the same number of spaces as the number you gobble up.
Numbertron is a fascinating, brain-teasing game with plenty of options to switch-up the gameplay and even offers a two player mode where, with the right options selected, can provide a Tron / light-cycles style game where you must try to block the other player in.
With different artwork (and loading screens - by Datad00r) depending on whether you order the MZ-80 or MZ-700 version, this will make an excellent addition to your MZ collection.
The game has also been designed to work on the Japanese MZ machines and is written to both sides of the tape.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Numbertron seems like a very unique idea. Are there any inspirations for your game?
Yes. The main inspiration is a game called Gold Monkey for Windows 3. Admittedly I've never actually played it, but I saw it in an episode of Shovelware Diggers on YouTube. It's got the basic gameplay of Numbertron, but without the scoring system and the refill, and it's also one-player only. When I saw it, I instantly liked the gameplay concept, but thought it would work even better as a multiplayer battle puzzler type game. Then I thought of some other features that would make it more interesting in one-player mode as well.
The diamond that doubles your score is one of those, and the inspiration for that came from a PC-game called Cosmic Snake. It was created by a friend of mine, Mikito Ichikawa, and funnily enough he liked Numbertron so much that he built upon the concept to create a PC-game called "Alice & You in the Planet of Numbers". And fittingly, for the final version of Numbertron, I borrowed an element from "Alice & You", the respawning clover that enables 'unlimited' play.
I should mention that there is an entire genre of these number clearing games on Unix, apparently. One example is a game called Greed. I would suspect the creator of Gold Monkey was inspired by those games.
How long did Numbertron take to develop and did you fit all the features in you wanted?
Originally, Numbertron was supposed to be a very quick palate cleanser type project, as I was struggling with a dungeon crawler that just got too big and unwieldy, and kind of put me off making games altogether. So I just wanted to do a small game to get something done.
The first version of the game was released through Patreon (as a bonus for those who supported my website, Spillhistorie.no) at some point in the summer of 2019. Then it kind of just sat there for a while, but about a year later I randomly came across a newly-released Commodore 64-game called Numbertron 2020, which is a very simple implementation of the same concept. I've no idea who made it, but it pushed me to put my original version of Numbertron online for everyone to download.
However, this also revealed a few problems with the game. I hadn't thought about the differences between the European and Japanese font ROMs, which caused the game to look a bit crap on Japanese machines (and even introduced a weird bug). Also, almost everyone seemed to play the game on the MZ-700 instead of the MZ-80, and it didn't look or sound as good on that platform. So that triggered a new period of development where I fixed the problems and made a colourful MZ-700-version, and in the process of doing this I also expanded the game with new features.
Not all my ideas for the game got implemented, but in general I'm quite happy with the final version.
Do you have any further plans for your game? Any further platforms which will see a release?
I have been thinking about making a 'remixed' version of Numbertron with a more arcade-ish feel and a different kind of progression. But I don't know if that will ever happen.
I'm actually working on a PC-version now. It will be expanded with new features, some original and some borrowed (ahem) from Alice & You, which I have played and enjoyed a great deal both before and after the official release. I'm not quite ready to show it yet, because the graphics are just placeholder stuff, and I'm still considering the various gameplay elements (some have to be tweaked a great deal, I suspect).
My plan is to give current Numbertron-owners access to an early PC-version as a sort of demo. So that's one of the reasons buyers also get that Itch.io link. Don't expect it anytime soon, though. :)
Can you reveal any future plans for games on the Sharp MZ machines?
My first proper Sharp MZ-game was Minesnake, and I have an early version of Minesnake 2 that is a major improvement over the original. The new engine is extremely fast compared to the first game, so I can have a lot of extra stuff going on (like enemies, moving parts of levels, etc.) and generally make it a deeper and more interesting game.
But as mentioned I'm working on Numbertron for the PC right now (while also learning how to actually make PC-games), and this is consuming all of my unfortunately very limited brain power. So we'll have to see when I get the chance to pick up the Sharp MZ again.
By the way, I did make a funny little one-button game as a learning project for the PC, that uses Sharpscii-graphics and sounds made with BASIC on the Sharp. So while it's not a real MZ-release, maybe Sharp-fans will like it. I'll make it available for free on Itch.io at some point in the not so distant future. :)
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