NO - Never Outside!
Alternative title: NO
Platform: Commodore 64
Region: pal
Controller: joy
Genre: Adventure
Gametype: Undefined
Release Year: 1989
Developer: Ordilogic / Lankhor
Publisher: Ordilogic / Lankhor
Players: 1
Programmer: Yves Grolet, Gilles Delmotte & Pana
Musician: Geert Vandevenne
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NO is a graphical role-playing adventure for the Commodore 64 and my first commercial project ever. It was developped by Ordilogic (our team) and published by Lankhor. Although the game was finished in 1987 (as shown in the main titles of the game), it was only released in early 1988 due to localisation delays. It is available in English, French and German.

The game uses a graphical interface at a time when text input adventure games were still common. It takes up 3 double-side disks (six sides total), mainly because of the many images it contains.

HOW IT ALL STARTED
When I changed school in 1985, I met with Yves Grolet. We had been tinkering with computers for a few years without knowing each orther and we both had a C64. We started developping ideas about making a game of our own. Yves was way ahead of me in term of programming and I was not too bad at making computer graphics.

We named our group Ordilogic (from the word 'ordinateur' which means computer in French) and started working on our adventure game. We were 16 years old.

There is some story behind the logo. At the time I was starting to play with my newly aquired Amiga and early ray tracing software. I was fascinated by all the techniques involved in computer graphics and this logo was a sum of all the notions I had recently absorbed, such as anti-aliasing and reflexions. Of course all this was done by hand pixel by pixel with the C64 multicolor and palette constraints.

If you look at the reflexion in the left mirror, you can see the triangle has some thickness although you cannot see it in the main view. I thought it was cool that you could give indirect hints like that through the use of reflexion.

NO was developped in the course of 3 years, during our evenings after school. It was mostly written in Basic with some assembly language on top for special routines, such as the split-screen which allowed the game graphics on top to be in multicolor mode (3 colors + background per 4x8 pixels bloc) while de text description and action icons on the bottom were in high resolution (2 colors per 8x8 pixels bloc). 

The logo of the game has also a story attached to it. Before I moved to my new school, I was dreaming about making a game based on the popular V series, of course without knowing anything about IP. You've got it, the NO logo with dripping blood is directly inspired by V.

FRANCK SAUER


http://francksauer.com/index.php/games/10-games/6-no-never-outside
