Breathing Life Into Gemquest

In the BASIC version, the monsters had a two-frame animation. The Warrior didn't, and always faced to the right. The motion was a bit jerky. I wanted Gemquest to be very smooth, and I wanted there to be lots of animation. I drew a two-frame animation for the Warrior, and I added a range of weapons with different variations for each possible weapon, with and without a shield. Here are all those animations:

I felt the Warrior wielding the bow was the one that turned out best.

In addition to the two-frame animations of the Warrior and each monster, I made the characters face in the direction of motion. Then, I added scrolling animations as you moved between rooms.

One of the great creative joys of writing Gemquest was coming up with special animations for specific circumstances. Some are easy to encounter while others are quite rare. I wrote a line-drawing algorithm that ended up the basis of a large number of effects, including the globe of force, lighting bolt, and cold-ray spells, as well as the fire-breathing monsters.

Various monsters and treasures got their own special animations, including the Hydra, Mirror Man, and Vampire, and the Magic Hammer. Here is the Mirror Man, when he suffers a critical hit:

As well, some of the passageways conceal traps, which had special multi-frame animations. Here is the Fire Trap that triggers when you walk across it:

Here is the test-animation for a fountain, that I never used:

I drew the animation imagery using my GREDIT tool, and often wrote BASIC programs view the frames as an animation so I could see and tune the results, before implementing them in assembly language.