An isometric castle adventure for the Vectrex, inspired by Atic Atac. A hundred and forty rooms across five floors, every wall, doorway and guardian traced as a line of light.
// The manor
One room fills the screen and nothing scrolls. Wandering ghosts, bats and spiders, guardians who chase you, doors that open and shut, locked doors that want the right key, and trapdoors that drop you a floor.
Five floors: the ground floor, the first floor, the attic, the basement and the caverns beneath. The map is the same file the Atari 2600 edition reads — one castle, two machines that could hardly be less alike.
The footage at the top is recorded from the ROM running in an emulator of the Vectrex.
// Rooms
Each room is a handful of lines: the far walls with their arched doorways, the open edges nearest you, and whatever lives there.
// Drawn in light
The Vectrex is the only games console ever sold that draws lines instead of filling a grid. There are no rooms painted in colour here: the walls, the doorways, the guardians and the staircases are all geometry, traced by an electron beam on a black tube.
The Atari draws the castle as isometric paving with the ARM on a Melody cartridge; the Vectrex draws the same isometric castle as outlines, at a scale the 6809 can keep up with.
// Follow along
DUSK MANOR for the Vectrex is in development. There is no release date yet. The dev log is where news turns up first.