Bird of Prey

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Bird of Prey
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Release type: Incomplete
Release date: N/A
Levels: ?
Author: Terry Cope
Website: T3 Software
Related games: ?


THIS GAME IS THOUGHT TO BE LOST
IF YOU KNOW MORE, PLEASE CONTACT


A vertical scrolling mission-based shooter by Terry Cope, that formed part of a larger game mythology.

Background[edit]

Celestial Saga is a series of games designed by Terry Cope which took on many forms. At times it might have been a pen and paper RPG, a third person space sim, an overhead shooter, and even a platformer similar to the Super Star Wars games. The series was inspired by Star Wars, Wing Commander, and Star Control. A mission-based vertical scrolling space shooter named Bird of Prey was one entry in the series which began to materialize. Each level in Bird of Prey was introduced with a debriefing session similar to X-Wing.

— Todd Cope, T3 History, t3-i.com

Bird of Prey was part of what would have been a series of games called Celestial Saga. The series was inspired by Star Wars, Wing Commander, and Star Control. Bird of Prey featured many alien races, some good, some bad, and an epic struggle.

Each mission was introduced with a debriefing session. The debriefing sessions were implemented as a level with an invisible character that responded to certain key presses that would move the character to the link that would take you into the actual level. One issue I remember having was the animations not working when they were at the edge of the screen. To fix it we had to redesign the layout of the debriefing screen.

The game was a vertical shooter. The vertical scrolling was implemented by using upward gravity on all the background tiles. In order to make the larger enemies we had to place several sprites together and come up with an explosion sequence that would destroy all the pieces when one was destroyed. It worked farily decently.

We didn't do anything special with the maps for Bird of Prey. We just kept our ideas within the limitations of the map size.

— Todd Cope, YouTube comment, 2010

Links[edit]