Running Knight (2023)
a FREE game by ‘Dr. Ludos’ for the Atari Lynx
Written for BrewOtaku #001 by Syed Raza
Running Knight is a creation by Dr. Ludos. The game itself is an endless runner, with a medieval topic — especially interesting for coders, the whole game is available with commented source code.
Mr. Ludos is a multi-talented coder, who has pleased a bunch of different systems already, such as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis, the Game Boy and the Atari VCS. His itch.io pages cover a nice bunch of releases. Grinding through them will take you a while.
BRAVE KNIGHTS, UNITE!
Back to Running Knight for the Atari Lynx. You have a knight stuck in a dungeon filled with deadly pillars. What makes these pillars deadly, we really don’t know! Some critiques say they’re lined with a venomous substance, while others say that they’re lined with secret explosives that go off as soon as our knight gets into contact with them. It’s important that he navigates his way around carefully!
Unfortunately, there are a lot of deadly pillars and keeping up concentration and reflexes turns out tricky after a couple of seconds. The number of obstacles increases by time — raising the difficulty bar slightly.
The current known high score is by Dr. Ludos himself, who claims that he has reached 723 points.
The soundtrack did not disappoint at all! The track resembles what you would expect a modern movie about knights to play, which adds up to the overall experience. The initial version had a size of under 50kb, which is also quite amazing.
Conclusion
An awesome and lovely endless runner game, good to blow off some dust from your Lynx. Overall, a worthy entry to the LynxJam 2023. Now we are laying back and happily waiting for Dr. Ludos to bring this title to other platforms, he codes for. Do we have a wish? Go for the Sega Genesis!
