The thinking behind the game Here's Andrew Braybrook's explanation of his plans for Paradroid: Gribbly's was all cute so this one is going to be high-tech. It is based around a large space ship. What you actually play on is a scrolling large-scale view of one of the decks, seen from above. You'll be able to access a plan of the whole deck but you won't be able to see the details on that. Another screen will be a side view of the ship so you can see where the deck is in relation to the whole ship. Other views include logging on to the ship's computer. The thing you actually play with are robots shown from above. There's going to be lots of them. If you want to know more about a particular robot what you do is log-on to a computer terminal. From there you can sift through all the robots and get large side view pictures and you can select things to get more information. I've been working hard on it for about four weeks, but I was working on utilities - programs to help make the finished game - for a couple of weeks before that. I always like to do the character set first because it buys time while you're thinking about the rest of it. It's probably the easiest thing that you can do. It's not really an arcade adventure - it leans more towards arcade. Gribbly's I wanted to be a non-violent game. All of the zapping and violence that I couldn't get into Gribbly's will be going into this one. Last week we designed the game's 20-deck space-ship, but I'd like to actually build one just to make sure it all works - all the lift shafts tie up and the decks fit together. Maybe I'll try using Lego. Dunno, it might work. So far I've got a little robot skating about inside a test deck plan. You can log onto a console, select an option, make an enquiry on the test robot and get a big picture of it. The piccie uses all eight sprites combined (the maximum available on the 64 at any one time). Despite being a view from above, I intend you won't be able to see anything behind a wall. You'll have to go into a room to actually explore it.