Outpost in the Dragon's Maw 1.1

Outpost in the Dragon's Maw is a retro style Match-3 Tower Defence game for the Uzebox open source game console, a bit of 8 bit madness involving an ATmega 644 and a bit of electronics to get it producing a video signal and accepting input from an SNES controller. Thanks to emulation, you may also have a few rounds of it right within your browser!

Now with Version 1.1, the game reached a fairly complete state!

If you want to play right away, proceed here (note that it needs a computer and a keyboard, it won't likely play well on a phone).

After the discovery of a lush new continent, you are tasked with establishing the first settlement on its shores to exploit its riches. This all goes well until mysterious disappearances start to surface along with uncertain sightings of large flying creatures...

What's new for Version 1.1

The original game (see its article here) unfortunately had to be left in a slightly incomplete state due to running out of ROM space, that is, there seemed to be no way to fit any more code in it.

This hurdle was now overcame by writing a better background tileset compiler (which is quite a bit a story of its own, in this game the background isn't plain old 8x8 tile images, it is actually program code), freeing up some 3 kilobytes.

What 3 kilobytes is good for? Quite a bit, fortunately!

• High scores stored in the EEPROM! This is probably the most noticeable, and also the largest thing, with quite a few tricky elements. One being that there is only 30 bytes of EEPROM usable due to Uzebox games all having to share it, which requires some infrastructure (find the right block, create it if needed etc), and some creative coding to fit longer names in it.
• Attack indicators, which become noticeable when playing the game, giving another angle of gameplay. There is no change in the game's mechanics, however knowing where strong dragons are coming gives more control over how you could prepare for them.
• There is now Undo, a feature fairly hidden, but coming handy on occasions. It is hidden since it is automatic: If you reverse a swap (which didn't match to change the board), the swap is added back to your budget.

Unfortunately the web emulator doesn't save EEPROM state as of now, so to fully appreciate high scores, either the real hardware or the PC emulator is needed.

How to play

If feeling a bit chewed up, or would like to see some tips on how to get further, please check out the first release's article.

Free source

The game and its art is released under General Public License Version 3 or Creative Commons BY-SA Version 4.0, as usual for games released for the Uzebox console. Feel free to play around with it, hope that tricky mess is at least as enjoyable as the game itself (if you like that sort of stuff)! ;)

You may look around in the game source on its Git repository.