Outpost in the Dragon's Maw

After the discovery of a lush new continent, you are tasked with establishing the first settlement on its shores to exploit its riches. This all goes well until mysterious disappearances start to surface along with uncertain sightings of large flying creatures...

Controls

You can navigate the cursor with the arrow keys in the emulator, use Space to select or deselect items, and Enter to switch between menus.

How to play the game

The goal is building up your defences to guard your settlement against the ever increasing onslaught of dragons by matching items on the playfield. Move at least three of them adjacent in a row or column to make a match.

• Stone towers are able to shoot at dragons in their close proximity (adjacent tiles including diagonals).
• Wooden ballista towers are able to shoot diagonally to any distance. They are unable to shoot directly above them.
• Cannons shoot explosive cannonballs forward which deal splash damage covering nine tiles.
• Markets buff the four directly adjacent tiles, so towers or cannons there deal more damage. Their bonus if multiple markets are adjacent to a tile doesn't stack.
• Gold gives you money to spend on expanding the settlement or to get more work done in a month.

The options in the Gold menu:

• End: Ends the month early. Up to a month's worth of swaps can be carried over to the next month if using this option.
• Pop: Get one more population. Every 10 population gives an extra swap for the month! This option gets more expensive if used excessively.
• Swap: Get an extra swap. Using it multiple times within the month makes it more expensive (there are limits how much your people can work!).
• Anyswap: Swap the tile where the cursor currently is with any other tile on the field.

While playing, knowing the followings may also come handy:

• Large matches and combo matches also earn you gold.
• Matching five or more tiles will jump a level (for example matching five small Level 1 towers would result in a Level 3 tower).
• Any item can be dropped at the cost of a swap by holding Select on it for about a second.

Backgrounds

Outpost in the Dragon's Maw is a game designed for a simple 8-bit homebrew console, the Uzebox (by Alec Bourque). It is based on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller, the ATmega644, which has 64 KBytes of ROM and 4 KBytes of RAM, driving video directly through an 8-bit port. It is clocked at 28.6MHz, however much of the processing time is taken for generating video signal, and most of what's left to compose the graphics.

The source code of the game is available on GitHub.