All #Psion #gamedev of #Barbarians was during the year 2010. Psion had stopped making and supporting consumer pocket computers many years before, so attention for the game was modest. A couple of years later it felt like I was the only person interested in Psions, so I stopped developing games for the Psion range altogether. http://damian.cyningstan.org.uk/downloads/215/barbarians
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At the end of 2012 I started developing games in assembly language for the #Sinclair #ZXSpectrum instead. I'd learned Z80 assembly language in my teens, decades before, but teenage me lacked the patience to develop anything serious in assembly language. Adult me would have lacked the patience to develop on the cassette-based Spectrum too, but by 2012 there were PC-based tools that made the process much smoother. https://cyningstan.itch.io/barbarians #gamedev #Barbarians
I limited myself to the basic 16k #ZXSpectrum, to prevent feature creep, and decided that a good first #gamedev project would be a port of my Psion game #Barbarians. Being out of work at the time, this took me only a month to complete, and was based on the look of the 16-bit Psion versions. The gameplay remained the same, although the game now realises you've lost if the number of barbarians gets unmanageable. https://cyningstan.itch.io/barbarians
Despite a lull in the Spectrum's popularity when the machine became obsolete, it had such affection among its former owners that its revival as a retro platform in the 2000s has allowed the #ZXSpectrum to maintain its popularity to the present day. So in 2012 when I released #Barbarians, the game attracted much more attention than the original Psion version ever did. It got some video playthroughs, and even a review in the Crash magazine annual! https://cyningstan.itch.io/barbarians #gamedev
Fast forward to 2024 and I decided the time was right to prepare the groundwork for an #msdos version of #Barbarians. I've been doing MS-DOS #gamedev aimed at early #cga #ibmpc machines since about 2020, and had already ported my third ZX Spectrum game Ossuary. I have more advanced ideas for ancient warfare than Barbarians, so I decided to start work on an MS-DOS port before the idea gets eclipsed by a more complex game on the same subject. https://cyningstan.itch.io/barbarians-dos
But in early 2025 I picked up my #cga roguelike #gamedev project for #msdos The Chambers Beneath again, which I'd been working on since 2021 and put aside to avoid burnout. The Chambers Beneath was released in July 2025, and shortly afterwards, the #DOSember game jam was announced. Since abandoned projects were allowed for this non-competitive jam, I thought #Barbarians would make a good entry. https://cyningstan.itch.io/barbarians-dos
My #ibmpc #gamedev projects use C, making this the third language I've used for #Barbarians. The graphics were based on the 32-bit version for the Psion Revo, but the 4-greyscale monochrome graphics were recoloured in the most colourful or gaudy of #cga palettes: blue, green, red, yellow. This palette gives a number of possibilities for dithered colours, so I have purple mountains, brown city walls, and forests in all kinds of autumnal shades. https://cyningstan.itch.io/barbarians-dos
