Edition : Micro-Programmes 5, 1985
Genre : Adventure
In this adventure game, the player takes the role of an archaeologist exploring an Egyptian pyramid, searching for the Scepter of Anubis. The player communicates with the game by entering text commands on the keyboard in the “verb + noun” format. Unfortunately, limitations of the vocabulary and parser made it hard for the player to progress. The tomb also contains unpredictable (and mostly fatal) traps which offered little in the way of interest to the player.
It (Sceptre of Anubis) was pitched to Loriciels on the release day of "L'Aigle D'or" (Golden Eagle), the famous title which set the bar for adventure games very high. Loriciels did not expect less from Sceptre of Anubis. To be refused by the principal publisher of the time was a hard blow. Finally it was published by Micro-Programmes 5 in a way coming very close to amateurism, once more. All the same, it was better than nothing...
As for the programming, the game was written in BASIC. Graphics are vectorial, this technique was employed at the time to store fixed images in the limited memory of the microcomputers, for example; Oric had only 48K of read-write memory. However as no commercial drafting package saved vectorial data, I had written a small very simple program to trace segments by moving a cursor on the screen with the arrows of the keyboard (there was no mouse). The coordinates were then converted into BASIC to be used in the game.
