FREEZE64 Christmas Demo

A few days ago, Vinny, who writes the really rather excellent C64 fanzine 'FREEZE64', messaged me on Twitter asking for a few screen grabs of Chiller 2 in action.  He is going to send an email out to his subscribers on Christmas Eve and will include some information about the game, along with said screen grabs.  He will also publish the URL of this blog to the "wider world".  Up to this point he is one of a very small, select group of trusted people who even know that this humble dev diary exists.

I should say at this point that Vinny has been very supportive "behind the scenes", offering lots of encouragement and interest.  Because of this support, I thought it might be a good idea to offer him an exclusive download as a thank you.

So currently, I'm stripping out all code pertaining to everything other than the title screen, level 1 and any display routines.  The result will be the first playable demo of Chiller 2.  I am limiting some things because I don't want to give too much away in this demo.  Thus, only a partial charset is included with the minimum number of sprites needed.  The music is a very early version of the main title screen music and amounts to about 10 seconds worth on a repeating loop.  If you play the demo and it drives you mad, tough!

As a bit of an afterthought, since this demo is an exclusive Xmas gift from FREEZE64 to it's subscribers and also riffing on the FREEZE title, I've decided to make the text in the demo white and various hues of blue, while adding settled snow and ice to the forest level.  I've also altered the "Chiller 2" sprites on the title screen to read "FREEZE64".  Why am I explaining this? Surely some images would be better!

Next diary entry...