Castle Quest Map laid out in one long row (100K)

 

Citadel Map (470K)
 

I have now completed two maps for two of my favourite games, Castle Quest and Citadel.

These are basically fairly easy to create. All you need is some screen grabbing software and an art package. For the two maps that I made I used Paint Shop Pro http://www.jasc.com as this combines both of the above requirements.

Firstly you set up the screen grabber in PSP and set it to capture screens on a right mouse click, to capture the windows client area, don't include the cursor and allow multiple captures.

Then start up BeebEm and run it at a resolution of 320x256. This way one pixel on the resulting image will be the same as one pixel in the original screen.

Now all you have to do is go though the entire game, and each time that you have a different screen, right click the mouse to send the screen shot to Paint Shop Pro. Try to remember to make the screen shot before picking up objects and solving puzzles.

In Paint Shop Pro you must then create a blank picture / workspace and slowly copy all the screen shots you have made, piecing them all together in your new workspace. I tended to do a part of the game and then assemble the screen shots as you
can remember where things go that little bit easier.

And that's all there is to it. Not really that hard, and it makes a great map. There are so many games that this could be used for Sabre Wulf, Jet Power Jack, Exile are just a few. I wouldn't try it with Elite though :-)