Development
| “ | We looked at Core's existing software range to see if there was a type of game that would complement it. We decided that a graphical adventure game in the Sierra and Lucasfilm mould would go down a treat (...) so a group of us adventure players sat down and designed the game. | ” |
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—Rob Toone, The One Amiga |
Versions of the game for both the PC and the Amiga were developed separately and simultaneously, in order to make the best possible product for each platform, rather than a quick port from one system to another. The original idea for the game was an action adventure similar to Another World. Its original working title was Zeloria, which later caused some confusion as several magazines continued to use "Zeloria" as the name of the land in the game; at least one magazine also incorrectly took Enchantia to be the name of the antagonist. It took a month for the project to be completely storyboarded before any programming work started on it. While the game's design evolved over time, its original plot remained largely intact.
The game mixes backgrounds hand-drawn with acrylics and then digitized by the concept artist Rolf Mohr, and sprite bitmap graphics made in Deluxe Paint and Brilliance on the Amiga with some rotoscoped animations. The animators Billy Allison and Stuart Atkinson created "huge" DPaint-made character sequences but they had to use them in game in more efficient way. The PC version used a 256 color palette, but the Amiga version had to be downscaled to 32 colors (including eight colors for the main characters). Regarding the decision to keep the onscreen text to a minimum, the game's co-designer Amiga version's chief programmer Rob Toone said that "too much reading can slow the game or kill it, like The Adventures of Willy Beamish," with Mohr adding that "hopefully, a picture will say a thousand words and make this system easy to use." According to Toone, "Lucasfilm gets most of its humour out of its text, whereas we hopefully get ours from comical animations and daft happenings." The player character's effective invincibility was a late demand by the producer Jeremy Heath-Smith, resulting in minor plot changes. There were also several other late changes that resulted in some of the already made graphics and other content being cut from the game. The game was officially revealed by Core at the ECTS in April 1992, along with Darkmere, and was originally planned to be released in September 1992.
Read more about this topic: Curse Of Enchantia
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