Housenka (Caterpillar)

Roman Žák came up with the theme of the game. It was the first program I created. I kept tweaking the game for a long time, and I believe the idea comes from Pac-Man. Roman simply liked something that eats. The caterpillar moves through a maze, and the further levels are about both complexity of the maze and the speed of movement. Roman came up with the idea that it would be a worm that gradually gets longer by collecting cabbages. As in Snake, it also has to avoid obstacles, which here take the form of skulls.

It's written in Basic. At the start, both the cabbages and the skulls are placed randomly. The cabbages come in two colours. The purple one is more nutritious: you grow more from it. The problem was that once a cabbage is eaten, new cabbages need to be added, but as the maze fills up, the random number function slows down. So I chose a different method: instead of generating them randomly, I created cabbages out of the skulls, which also solved the problem of skulls piling up somewhere and blocking a passage. And new skulls appear behind the caterpillar. Little piles of droppings appear behind the caterpillar too – that's an extra joke.

Here, exceptionally, the music wasn't my idea; I think Jan Špaček himself brought me a rock'n'roll piece he had written. The music that beeps during the game is there to slow things down. I think Michal Zintl brought it to me as sheet music, and I naively thought it was so sophisticated, but it's just chords broken down into individual notes going up and then back down again.

Nádražák (The Railwayman)

In the second year of secondary school we were on an internship. There wasn't much to do there, so we went to see classmates who had a Commodore computer with games. And that's where I saw Sokoban. I copied down all the levels, and that's how the idea for the game Nádražák ("The Railwayman") came about. I wasn't satisfied with a mere copy. At the time I was fond of mazes, so everything is set in a very complicated maze connecting the individual rooms. And I was also fond of the songs of Šíp and Uhlíř. So the theme and the name are derived from the song "Šel nádražák na mlíčí" ("A Railwayman Went Out for Fish Milt"). That's why the individual rooms are from a railway station building and its surroundings. The intro song is that very one. The game is again programmed in Basic.

Business

The game is again programmed in Basic and is inspired by Monopoly and its Czech variant, Dostihy a sázky ("Horse Racing and Betting"). We often played it at home, so I drew on it when making my next video game. So that was the next idea. It's practically unplayable, because converting it into a computer game isn't a good idea. The intro song is "Zelená vlna Hvězdy" ("Radio Hvězda's Green Wave"), sung by Luděk Sobota.

Školák / Školní akce (School kid / School action)

That was another year of internship, another encounter with a game on the Commodore. This time a classmate was playing an exploration game of sorts, where you walk around a maze, look for something, find it, carry it somewhere else and use it. The setting is our own school, the then Gymnázium Vysočany. The individual rooms are drawn and stored as data. They're displayed magnified 4 times. Martin Žampach programmed the display for me. For each room, 4 different hint texts are shown (the room is divided into 4 sectors). Two are constant and appear in all rooms; two are variable, different for each room, and they hint at what's supposed to happen. The intro song is "Meliorační" ("Land Reclamation") by Šíp and Uhlíř.

ArtHudba (ArtMusic)

The name is a play on ArtStudio. The idea came from my secondary school classmate Michal Zintl, who also took part in making it. We liked the professional program Wham! The Music Box, which had one shortcoming: the music could be played, but it couldn't be used while a program was running. So we wanted to make a similarly user-friendly program for working with the Basic command BEEP, which is normally unintelligible. We fine-tuned the look of the program together; the keyboard handling and the output I then did on my own. We drew the title picture together – ArtStudio allowed merging two pictures into one, so we combined the parts each of us had drawn.

Predit (Professional editor)

In all the programs mentioned above, I needed to draw characters and objects in the 8x8 character format. On the ZX Spectrum, these are stored in so-called graphics characters kept at the end of memory. At first I wrote a simple editor for that, which I called Grazny. Then printers came on the market – the single-pin BT100. And for those… that was another expansion, whole alphabets had to be defined. So I extended the original Grazny to allow drawing a whole alphabet and even choosing the grid size. I think the main program is Basic compiled into assembler.

The ZX Spectrum's memory was limited after all, so from the beginning there were efforts to make the programs smaller and faster. I was learning assembly and tried programming in it. But that wasn't the right path for me, and in the end I looked for other ways of working. One of them was Basic-to-assembly compilers, and the other was the help of my classmate Martin Žampach, who made several usable routines for me.