David Lara sent me an email about a very old school game he ported named L’Abbaye des Morts .

The 2d platform game is freeware and the ported and rewritten game is also under the free source GPLv3 license.

An obsolete videogame for a dark passage of history

In the 13th century, the Cathars, who preach about good Christian beliefs, were being expelled by the Catholic Church out of the Languedoc region in France.

One of them, called Jean Raymond, found an old church in which to hide, not knowing that beneath its ruins lay buried an ancient evil.

A style close to Spectrum ZX, with its dark background and bright colors, proper fit with the story, because it does look old and somewhat horrifying. Also, the gameplay is direclty inspired by Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy.





Here is was David Lara wrote :

“Hi!

I wrote this email to you because we released a Linux version of

“L’Abbaye des Morts”, a indie platform game released by LocoMalito

(www.locomalito.com) in 2010 for the Windows platform.

Because the game was made with GameMaker tool, no source code are

available. I rewrite the game in C language with the help of SDL

libraries (the code can be improved, I’m newbie in programming). Also,

I add the feature to “switch” between the original artwork (8 bits

style) or a enhanced version (16 bits style) that Locomalito redraw

for a Megadrive/Genesis port.

The code is released under GPLv3 license. The project is open to

anyone that wants to improve, optimize the code, port to others

platfoms, etc.

A member of the project (doragasu) has ported the code to OpenPandora

console. A port to GamePark consoles is in the works.

Home of the project:

http://code.google.com/p/ abbaye-for-linux/

(Here, you can access to SVN repo, and Downloads sections with source

code and packages for Ubuntu, Fedora and openSuSE).

OpenPandora package:

http://repo.openpandora.org/? page=detail&app=abbaye

(Here you can find pictures of the game)

We hope you find this interesting 🙂

—

Greetings,

David Lara”