The Colony (computer game)

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The Colony
Studio Mindscape
Publisher Mindscape
Senior Developer David Alan Smith
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 1988 (DOS, Mac OS)
1990 (Amiga)
platform Mac OS , DOS , Amiga
Game engine FLY-BY Environment Simulator
genre Ego shooter
Game mode Single player
control keyboard
medium diskette
language English

The Colony is a computer game by Mindscape for the Apple Macintosh , which was released in 1988. In 1988 it was ported to ( Intel ) PCs , although the (important) sound fell by the wayside. When porting to the Amiga in 1990 , color was added. It was the first 3D first person shooter on the Macintosh. The categorization can just as easily be “ adventure ” or “ role play ”.

The game was realized by himself by David Alan Smith, who worked full time with the remote control of mobile robots.

The 3D representations are based on simple wireframe models with hidden hidden edges and symbols. The aliens are composed of pyramidal shapes and circles, insect bodies reproduced.

Game flow

All functions are controlled with the one-button Macintosh mouse of the time: moving forwards and backwards, turning, picking up objects, opening doors, firing the weapon, etc. A crosshair shows the direction of movement, on the side there is an orientation according to the compass direction and in the grid grid .

At the beginning the player finds himself in a dark room and sees a command console in front of him. Here he learns that his spaceship has made an emergency landing and is damaged. He can turn on the lights, destroy himself and the planet by firing rockets, but not start. Upon further investigation of the spaceship, it turns out that it is a space marshal and was approaching the atmospheric moon because the scientific colony located there sent an emergency call. He also learns the marshal's opinion that it is a good thing that these “crazy scientists” with their dangerous experiments are kept far from the gunshot.

Inside the ship you can find a broken reactor column, a spacesuit and a weapon. The reactor column must be replaced by one from the colony. For the time being, it remains completely open how this can be done.

Already on the way to the entrance of the underground colony, first encounters with aliens can take place, but they can be escaped by running quickly and who have penetrated the colony through the teleportation experiments of the scientists and are now multiplying rapidly there.

In the colony you learn that all adults were victims of the aliens (the graphics create an atmosphere like in the film Alien I ), but that they were able to bring their children to safety in survival systems. In order to get to the reactor column, the player must successfully complete at least a few battles against aliens. In the simplest solution, he can expand the column of the colony and flee. That alone is a difficult and tricky task. It is necessary to at least partially map the colony, to develop strategies for action and movement, to understand the products of the scientists and to use them.

If you leave the moon without the child survival systems, there is a serious rebuke and also the news that the aliens have broken out of the colony and attacked the animated galaxy.

If you destroy the moon after departure without having saved the children, the rebuke is even more bitter. Bringing the six (you have to find out for yourself that there are six) survival tanks into the spaceship, while being transported unarmed to be exposed to the attacks of the aliens, requires a lot of ideas and skill.

An interesting idea is the character named Snooper . Snooper hits you for the first time after about two hours of playing and takes almost all of your energy away. From then on it comes at ever faster intervals. He cannot be fought. You can't avoid it and learn: This is the (ultimate) warning not to play too long! If you turn the computer off and only turn it back on the next day, you have two hours of rest in front of Snooper, but not on the same day.

Decisive solution steps

The following steps or findings are important for the solution:

  1. The spaceship must be left in a spacesuit and armed.
  2. Airlocks must also be used as such.
  3. By overflowing the alien eggs that can be found everywhere in the colony, you can replenish and increase your energy supply.
  4. There is an alien queen on every floor of the colony (the name is chosen automatically because she looks like a stylized bee). If you eliminate them, all active aliens on the floor disappear and you can act in peace. Except for the queen in the reactor, however, it is not crucial to do that.
  5. From floor to floor the aliens get faster, more aggressive and the attacks are more energetic. To fight the queen at the reactor core - at the very bottom - you have to be well prepared. The weapon that is set to the highest performance cannot be used in the game (and does not need it either) because then your own energy consumption, even if you do not use the weapon, is too high to survive long. The changeover is only possible in the spaceship. That's why you start the fight on a new game day (because of Snooper) and first “fill up” with as much energy as possible. Then you go to the spaceship and get the weapon with the highest power. Nothing should go wrong on the way to the Colony reactor, you have to know the way in your sleep, otherwise there will be insufficient energy. If you make it fast enough, one hit is enough and the queen is gone and you can (must) put down the weapon.
  6. You will be beamed from teleporter 1 in the secret laboratory to teleporter 2 and so on. The last one sends you into nirvana just like the unnumbered ones in the normal laboratories ...
  7. If you approach a teleporter with an empty forklift, you can transport it. If you have a load with you, you can drive into the teleporter and be transported with a forklift and load.
  8. This is important because you can only leave the colony area, in which the scientists' experiments led to the curvature of space, which gave the aliens access, via a teleporter you brought with you, and this is the only way to get the child hidden there out.
  9. The same applies to the reactor core of the colony: a forklift can be used to go down the stairs, but not up again and there is no lift.
  10. In addition, the colony is powerless after the expansion of the reactor core, so the lifts no longer work, the doors do not etc. So it is also necessary to bring the receiver teleporter into the spaceship beforehand.
  11. A reactor core that you have on the forklift truck will be destroyed when you put it down. The transport of the core from the colony to the spaceship and its installation there must therefore run in one go and requires careful planning - especially because the spaceship has to be removed beforehand, which in turn switches off all functions in the ship, such as airlocks, doors, etc. .
  12. Since this is the last action you can do in the colony, all children must of course have been brought into the spaceship beforehand.
  13. One notices that the elimination of the queens in the colony deactivated all aliens there, but not those on the surface of the moon, which are even increasing in number. That is the hint that you have to destroy the moon after departure.

particularities

The Colony was named "Best Adventure Game of the Year" by American MacWorld magazine in 1988 and in 2000 was listed in their "The Top Ten Mac Gaming Thingies of the Last 1000 Years".

When the game was being developed, almost all programming for the Macintosh took place on the Lisa . Development tools for the Macintosh were not available so soon after its launch. According to the game manual, David Alan Smith developed the first scenes of The Colony with a C compiler ported by Softworks . The Macintosh (Mac I) used for this had only 128 KB of RAM and a single floppy disk drive.

Some technical details: Instead of a 360-degree circle, The Colony uses 256 "pseudo-degrees". This enabled the entire rotation to be encoded in just one byte. Similar, memory-saving programming tricks can be found in abundance in the software. The graphics for the individual actions were created with MacPaint . The associated images such as movable doors, information and the Apple logo then sprang from the developed game processor.

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