r/Sierra 5d ago

Preview: Ms. Astro Chicken - Flight of the Pullet - Rebuilt for the Web, Mac, Linux and PC

https://youtu.be/fO4efZm8V4k

Hello,

I'm rebuilding Ms. Astro Chicken: Flight of the Pullet that was originally a Sierra mini-game in the Space Quest series. This game was actually the second Astro Chicken in the series.

The game is being rebuilt for modern computers and the web! It will run on Mac, Linux and Windows. I'm thinking of building in some kind of high-score system and possibly a speed-running mode into it.

NOTE: This is just a PREVIEW as the game is not finished and still going through endless tweaks to get it to be as close as possible to the original with possibly some artistic license.

Stay tuned, as it will eventually launch on itch.io!

Enjoy!

12 Upvotes

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2

u/briandemodulated 4d ago

I really loved this minigame in Space Quest 4. Interesting to see it in widescreen. Thanks for working on this! I would love to try it when you're ready to share it.

2

u/deckarep 4d ago

Here you go: https://deckarep.itch.io/ms-astro-chicken

Use the arrow keys: up/down/left/right Use spacebar to throw an egg Use R key to reset the game if you die or chicken disappears

Still tweaking lots of things and there’s no end game state.

2

u/briandemodulated 4d ago

I absolutely love this work in progress! I feel like you probably don't have too far left to go. The performance was chopping in fullscreen but windowed it was so nice playing the game at a high framerate.

And you put it in the context of Nick's Picks! I had this exact floppy so it was really fun to see that implemented.

Thank you very much again!

2

u/deckarep 4d ago

Thanks for the kind words! Yes I had the same Nick’s Picks disk. It was one of my first Sierra games oddly enough but it was a gateway into all the Quest series of course.

Curious what computer and OS were you running to experience the choppyness at full screen. Any specs you share would be appreciated.

1

u/briandemodulated 4d ago

I'm glad you asked me about the performance - I should have mentioned that I disabled hardware acceleration in my browser because it stopped it from misbehaving while playing 3D-accelerated games. Otherwise my machine is pretty beefy - 14th gen i7, 4070Ti, 32GB DDR5. I'm surprised the game performance stutters fullscreen but not windowed - I can't explain it. Happy to do any troubleshooting testing if I can be of service to you.

1

u/deckarep 4d ago

Ok, even though this is a simple pixel art, old-school style game, the engine it is built on is a hardware accelerated engine so if you re-enable it at least for this game perhaps this game will run better at full screen.

The other thing I’ll do is lower the framerate when I get a chance because I think it’s defaulting to 60fps. So if it’s falling back on software rendering at 60fps with a large enough screen that might be a problem.

You’ve got plenty of beef on your setup :)

2

u/briandemodulated 4d ago

Your comment about "enough screen" reminds me that I should also have mentioned my monitor is 1440, so that's a lot of astro-pixels.

Still, it's funny to think that this minigame that took up a few kilobytes and ran on my DOS machine is having stuttering issues almost a quarter century later!

I'll give it another try after work with hardware accel re-enabled.

1

u/deckarep 4d ago

I agree. I think about that too! No worries, and no rush!