re be added? (assuming the crush for the
keyboard could be worked out)

AC: We want a game where more than one person can enjoy at the same time,
We wanted to achieve a game that challenges a group of players rather than
one player. As for more than 5 players, that really is dependent on the timeline of when active hardware engineers in the scene release new and exciting things which, coincidentally, happened around the same time we released Bomberland. In July of 2013, two Czech sceners (Ray/Unreal & PCH/Unreal) developed a multi-joy adapter running via a HCS08 CPU, which enables you to connect 8 joysticks at once. So who knows? Maybe Skull
could adapt this new feature in an expanded version of Bomberland or a completely new project.

AS: Five players do a lot of mayhem, but the fact is that getting 8
players in the code does not constitute any major modifications. A small problem with the display would be the fifth player, which requires
additional IRQ requests that are also calculated every time. The game mobs
are dual-layer and five players would need ten sprites. While in the case
of monster mobs, it can anticipate the movement and control - the code will
not allow more than 3 in a row (plus a player gives it 8 sprites in line),
in the case of multiplayer it could happen. However this problem
disappears if we decide to use single layer sprites (but would reduce pixel resolution ), then we have 8 sprites for each of the 8 players. A set of
keys to operate the 5th player is also not accidental. The matrix keyboard uses the same registers as joysticks - this leads to a conflict when
reading. Currently selected keys are only sensible if they don't conflict
with the joysticks. Therefore, the next players will not be able to use
the keyboard.

- - - - - - - - - -

Q: You mentioned about how you met, so how did you both end up working together on this project?

AC: Well I first met Skull face to face at Silesia 4 demoparty in Poland,
in September of 2010. It was also the first time we actually spoke to each other too, despite the fact that we had both been in Samar Productions approximately 4 years beforehand, at the time when we both released Bomerlands's predecessor, Bomberman C64 (that was through the help of Ramos/Samar, who provided my music to Skull directly). In the beginning, communication was rusty... I don't speak Polish (although I am learning a
bit ;)), and Skull was still getting to grips of speaking English
flawlessly. Nevertheless, we have got on well over the years; and I
believe we're a great development team, despite the fact that we're from
two different countries. :) Although I knew that Skull was the coder of it all, I actually first heard of the Bomberland project from a German scener named "doZe", who is also a member of Samar. It was he that asked me to
write music for the game, this was about six years before the official
release. I haven't heard from doZe for a long time though, so that made me assume that the project was put on hold. But when I met Skull at Silesia
4, he showed me the current work he had done on the project on his C64
setup at the party. I was so blown away with the work he did, that it convinced me enough to ditch my old work; and make some new, top-quality
music for the final game.

AS: Yes mainly what Conrad said, and yes the biggest obstacle for us was
the language barrier

- - - - - - - - - -

Q: Do you have plans for any further releases, and do you think you would
port the game onto other Commodore hardware?

AC: We're actually thinking of producing an extended disk-version of Bomberland game sometime this year; but we are not sure exactly set on an official release date yet. As for other Commodore hardware... Bomberland
is also playable on a C64GS and (as you know already) and on the C128 but,
in regard of other Commodore computers such as the Plus4, C16 or Vic20, we haven't planned to develop such ports.

AS: For me personally I just wanted to code a good bomberman clone game on sixtyfour, and I think I have achived this with Conrads help! is already finished that was my intention and we are both happy with the end result".
I do think about completely different games, and in my dreams, I have still
a lot of them :) I do not think I'll find time to port Bomberland to other
of a platforms though.

- - - - - - - - - -

Q: the game is listed as Samar Productions, we have already spoke about
the group but can you tell our readers; who makes up this team of coders,
you said the group was primarily a Demo coding group; and this is your
first real game release

AC: Samar Productions is a Poland-based demo group, it was founded in September 1993 by Ramos. It is, indeed, a group who primarily release
demos, as well as music-collections. Although the majority of the members
are Polish, there are/were many foreigners in the group too. I believe I
am the first English/UK scener to join this group, and this was in January 2007. Some of the greatest demos they have released include:

Extacy (1996), Opium (1997), Digital World (1998), Air Power (1999), I Love
the Cube (2011-12), Dream Travel (2011-12), and most recently a co-op demo
with Arise (a well-respected Polish demo group) called "Fogyish" (2013).

Samar have released some other games in its timeline! however ;these were
very small games released to the public domain. Bomberland, however, is officially the first published game developed by Samar.

From what I've read in forums and other places, there's been rumours for
many years that; some people in the Polish scene consider Samar as a lamer group, mainly because of the leader (Ramos). Whether those rumours are
true or just a joke, I'm personally not bothered about it... I like being
in this group; and there's a lot of friendly members/ex-members that I've
met. :)

AS: Haha! You tell them Conrad! Samar is a large group with a lot of
Polish sceners; however parting was not always friendly, and yes some
people accused us of being 'lamers'. There are really a lot of talented
people in the group. Yes, Bomberland is the first game released
commercially on c64 from the Polish group (and it comes after more than
thirty years since the creation of C64 ;-)).

- - - - - - - - - -

Q: It has to be said that the quality of the title is very high. Did you intend to make a playable game? Or were you setting out to make the best
title possible to WOW the scene, and show people what the group was capable
of?

AC: Both really. :) as Skull said; This title has gone through many
revisions and phases, I think Skull and myself wanted to make a great
impact in the C64 scene; and the gaming community. I believe we achieved
that with this title! :)

AS: Exactly!

- - - - - - - - - -

Q: I read and you have already mentioned that the music routine caused problems, and that Conrad rewrote a special player for his music. What
were the issues with the music?

AC: This was basically an issue of memory space on a 64K memory chip.
When I finished and compiled all the tunes in late 2010, the resulting
memory size was well over $2000 (8192) bytes. But during the development,
I was informed by Skull that the maximum memory space for static music data
is $2000 bytes. This was a problem for me personally because, in order to reduce the compiled music to less than $2000 bytes, I would have to reduce
the quality of musical patterns that I originally composed; (so for
example, miss out some drums here, remove an appreggio there, get rid of
this instrument here, and so on). I did carefully optimise the entire
music data as much as I could for the official music player that it was compiled for, but it still didn't get down to $2000 bytes. So I got on my thinking cap and tried a different approach... I decided to extract all of
the pattern/track data, convert it, and transfer it into a brand new music routine that I had coded by myself. T

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