Please login to submit a screenshot

Q-Bic looked like such a slick well presented game that it could have easily been released as a commercial title. Was it ever intended to be a commercial game or you always intended it to be charityware? Did you see if Storm would publish it?

Thanks. But I think it was a little bit too small and simple to be commercial. I made it because I loved the arcade machine so much. I think Q*bert was a fun and elegantly designed game.

How many levels are in the game? Is there an end screen? Or does it wrap around at some point?

I don't remember how many levels there are. But it definitely ends up in a loop - just like the arcade machine.

Was it written in your spare time?

Yes.

How long did Q-Bic take to write?

Not long. I knew the Amiga like the back of my hand by that time, and the game did not stretch the Amiga's capabilities. So I kept the code simple, and concentrated on making the graphics and sounds as polished as I could. It's the last game I ever made all by myself. I did the graphics, sound effects, I composed the music, too. And that's my voice muttering when the side-walkers appear.

The readme for the game says that it takes 400kb of memory or so. That seems a very large amount for a "simple" game considering something like Silkworm or SWIV uses only 100kb or so more and is full of attack waves and scrolling backgrounds etc! Are there extra presentation screens I haven't seen or did you use the extra memory for much clearer sound effects or something?

I used all available memory to make it pretty and slick, because I could. By the way did you notice that the default high score table has cubist painters on it? Geek humor.

How did this game end up on CU Amiga's coverdisk?

I'm not sure. I guess they grabbed it from the bulletin boards. I made the game free for everyone, and that included CU Amiga.

Regarding that particular coverdisk: "The ELSPA didn't take too kindly to CU Amiga giving away Shaun Southern's conversion of the classic 8-bit blaster POD, and promptly banned them from featuring any more such conversions on their coverdisks! The September 1992 issue also featured the superb Q-Bert clone Q-Bic on the same disk as POD." Did you know about this?

Well, I like the use of the word "superb"! I know nothing about the POD controversy.

Is the music player on St Dragon, Rodland and QBic identical? Would QBic have the latest replayer code that would be backwards compatible with all of them?

No, the music code and the data format were thoroughly revised between those titles.

Q-Bic appears to be your final Amiga game (sob!). What happened that made you stop writing Amiga games?

The opportunity of writing SWIV for the Super Nintendo came along. The prospect of programming for games consoles was just too exciting to pass up. And, as it turned out, a great career move.