Archaist is a remake of David Lubar's 1984 game Pastfinder, a vertically scrolling shoot'em up with elements of strategy and an unusual pacing. While critically acclaimed, Pastfinder never got quite the audience it deserved, possibly due to a near complete absence of marketing.
The remake attempts to retain everything that made the original so addictive.
Much effort has gone into getting all the little things right; timing,
scoring, object distribution and so on. Nevertheless there's also as much new stuff as could fit without straying
too far from the original: New game types can be selected, including a frantic
shooter mode and both competitive and cooperative two player modes. Several
control schemes are supported, including mouse and one switch controls.
Gameplay and difficulty can be fully customized. There are random maps. And
all these options are available both with updated art and in a "retro"
mode which mimics the original.
The choice of game was preceded by a week of replaying all those games we enjoyed back then, to see which remained as fun today as decades of growing nostalgia would have it. The surprisingly long list was much shortened by eliminating those games already remade, and the remainder were assigned scores based on updatability, feasibility, potential accessibility and, of course, fun. We ended up with a coin toss between Pastfinder and Firelord.
Having a full three months ahead of us and a carefully laid out schedule, we expected this project to be a breeze. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, nothing went as planned. With Tesa stuck in a more pressing project, all work on the graphics had to wait until less than a month before deadline. The audio too was delayed, to the final week when we were really supposed to tie things up into a working package. As the last day begun, four levels were still missing, half the game was soundless, no options had been hooked into the menu, and our baby decided that this was a good day to go completely without sleep.
That we actually managed to get the entry done in time is a miracle in adrenaline and self abuse, but obviously something had to go wrong. One single forgotten function call in over 40 000 lines of code, a remnant from an experiment in making the game run smoother, rendered the game completely unresponsive on an unknown percentage of the machines meant to run it, including those of three out of the five judges.
Still, we had the great honour of receiving Barrie's spot prize despite us having knocked ourselves out of the real competition. And since the bug in question is now long gone, a quote from Oddbob's review: Both a fantastic package and a fantastic game. If you've not played it yet - it begs the question "why the hell not?"
The current
release mostly improves on the low vision accessibility features. If you
use these, or have a version of the game older than v1.1, this update is a must.
While most of the things we wanted in the final version are now in place,
the game is still a work in progress. Any suggestions and bug reports are gladly
accepted while we prepare the final release.
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