It was all about working out how to make the games work so that we could produce the full trilogy in 4 parts. It needed to move forward while retain the spirit of the original games in a way that The Citadel didn't. Originally there were a lot of things that were going to change - Mike and I never wanted to put out a game like the original. But then I've been playing this game for nearly 30 years all told! And I can get quest victory in less than an hour. I would say it's easier to win, but mainly because of nearly 30 years of gaming advances, and the speed of the device etc! I've been able to have a military victory after a few hours of playing. Luckily I had a small army of testers testing the game before release. but along the way I could have broken a few things. The Midnight Engine was always about being able to easily write Lords of midnight-like scenarios and games. I say should because it all comes out of my original Assembler port, translated to C++, and made data driven and without boundaries.

Now we could just run the algorithms realtime and be able to have fluid movement.īut the artificial intelligence should be the same. In the original ZX Spectrum version, all the maths was pre-calculated and stored in lookup tables to make it as quick as possible. it would mean that as the sun dips and moves across the sky, and the moon rises, the light would cast realistic shadows and have nice highlight lighting. And we would be able to realtime light 2d images, something that is usually the preserve of 3d graphics. Mike was also working on some new graphics techniques that would allow us to draw lots of different terrain graphics, with a small subset of assets. With hindsight it would have been easier to find a way to make real 3D look like the original. Being 2D and the nature of them means they are large and slow to draw. The graphics are also strangely problematic. So finding a way for that to work properly took a little tweaking. Mike always saw them as a Medieval painting. However, the characters at the front of the screen don't fit with that model. It's pretty straight forward 3D maths for a cylindrical projection. The sliding around and moving forward works really nicely. The one which was tricky was the sliding panoramic.

How hard was it to make the app – and how true is it to the original game? We caught up with Chris Wild, the man who has brought it to the smartphone nearly 30 years after it first came out – and in the year that creator Mike Singleton passed away. Seminal 80s ZX Spectrum game The Lords of Midnight is now out on iPhone.

For iphone download Lord of Midchester