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History of the DOS version
==========================

   The next paragraphs are extracted from the DOS version of Heroes.

   We started this game in summer 96. The idea came form Guen.  At this
moment, we were only three: Guen, Toalnkor (now known as Tnk) and me
(Pollux); Alexel joined us one year later.  The development was going
quite slow (it took us two years actually) mainly because of our
studies.  Maybe the fact that Guen and me communicated by (snail-)mail
was another slowing down factor.  I sent more than 60 letters to Guen
during this two years !  During the first year, we decided to sell the
game.  We made a demo version (with only 10 levels, no editor, and an
order form), and a CD version (with songs remixed on audio track, but
not used in the game).  Our main issue was the price of Midas' license
(the sound engine used); we were also hesitating on the way we should
distribute Heroes (shall we do it shareware or commercial ?).  Finally,
after a couple of wasted months we decided to spread it freeware (Enjoy
!), because we thought that no one would really like to buy such a game
today; today where 3D rules.

   Now let's talk about the content of the game.  At first, Tnk decided
to make some four channels songs in the old original mod format.  As
there were only two scores done and we were waiting for the next tunes,
we used some songs from Clawz just to vary. These were 'overtaking' and
'hibakusha2' and gave a better taste to the game.  So we removed old
Tnk's songs and he was asked to make some more Clawz-like musics. By the
time, Alexel joined and came with 10 channels XM, thus all tunes are now
8 or 10 channels XM... There were 13 tunes in the game (for a total of
2.88Mb unpacked), these are the intro tune, the menu tune, the 10
levels, and the end tune (you can't hear the later without finishing
the quest game); most of them have been done by Alexel.

   All sprites and pictures were drawn by Guen.  He first made some
level-tiles and a set of hand-done previews of the game before any other
work get started (I guess he has a few other projects at this state of
development at home).  These screens and tiles were used to make the
level editor.  Actually I learned C while making this editor so there
is some piece of code I am not proud of into (and also in the game).
When it was nearly done, I started to code the game.  The first thing
done was the introduction, and then came the multi-directional
scroller.  I remember that the first level which was loaded was sized
4x4 and wrapped in all directions; this was very small but at this time
there were no tails and the vehicles were crossing the walls...

   Most of the levels were done by Guen. But Tnk and I also did some.
Guen made a cleanup of all the levels we made: some were relegated in
the EXTRALVL directory, other were simply erased. We aimed to spread
the game with 100 of them, but as it is going late and that we are not
going to sell the game anymore I don't know how many levels there will
be.