Lionheart

Gameplay

Lionheart is a 2D action-platformer. Players move from left to right fighting their way through levels filled with monsters and environmental hazards like water, chasms, lava and fireballs. Valdyn can run, jump, crouch, swing and climb bits of the scenery. When running downhill, Valdyn gains speed which enables him to jump much further than normally. There are also ropes and slopes to slide down, but then he cannot get back up the way he came, so they should be approached with care. Combat is an important part of the game. Valdyn is armed with a sword and is able to perform several attack moves, including a high strike, a middle strike, a low kick, a reverse strike (which enables him to swirl around and attack enemies behind him), a jump strike and a downward strike (where Valdyn jumps in the air and then slams down into the ground using his sword).

The game is divided into 14 levels, some of which feature end-of-level boss fights. At first, the player has four health points, three lives and two continue options. Health points are lost whenever Valdyn is hit, and a life is lost whenever health reaches zero, or Valdyn suffers a fatality as in when falling into a chasm. There are a number of power-ups (usually in hidden sections of each level) like "Energy Drinks" that replenish health, and "Life Spheres" which grant more lives. Each level has several "Energy Crystals" which the player can collect. Every 100th crystal "unlocks" one life point out of four more available; optimal performance means that the player can have a maximum of eight life points before the end of the game, making survival easier. The player can also find more powerful swords; the more powerful a sword, the less hits are required to kill a stronger opponent.

There are three difficulty levels. The harder levels feature harder opponents, but also differently designed environments, offering an additional gameplay experience. Moreover, many of the stages are significantly expanded, resulting in an even longer game than before.

Plot

One day, Valdyn was gambling in his favorite inn when a group of royal guards arrived and arrested him. After an unpleasant time in the palace's dungeon, he is summoned by the King and is assigned a quest: the Lionheart, the holiest (and titular) relic of the Cat People and center of their religion, has been stolen by thieves sent by the evil Norka. If the King is not able to demonstrate his divine right to rule by publicly displaying the holy relic in the upcoming Showing Festival, he will be forced to abdicate and be replaced by his arch-chancellor Nargle. Furthermore, the night the Lionheart was stolen, Valdyn's beloved Ilene was praying in the Temple's entrance chamber and the thieves turned her to stone using a very rare poison which can only be found in Norka's country. If there is a cure, Norka's domain would be the place to look. Based on his nickname, the priests declare that Valdyn is destined to reclaim the jewel and escort him to the temple to prepare him for his quest.

In the introduction, Valdyn is given a flying dragon but on his way to Norka's country, he is abducted by a flying ship. Valdyn escapes and is forced to travel on foot. The first few levels feature an environment of swamps and caves before Valdyn reaches a city in Norka's domain. A "volcano level" follows, which includes a hidden level where the player can gain several power-ups and an amulet. In the following level Valdyn finds a dinosaur-like steed running after Norka's flying ship. Valdyn frees his dragon, and rides it towards Norka's flying fortress in a level that resembles a horizontally scrolling shooter. The final levels feature Valdyn climbing to the top of the fortress and his final confrontation with Norka. The game epilogue has Valdyn return the Lionheart in the Temple, still grieving for Ilene, but in the optimal ending, if the player has found the amulet in the earlier hidden level, Valdyn is able to heal Ilene.

Development

After finishing Ghost Battle (1991) as freelancers, Austrian programmer Erwin Kloibhofer and Dutch graphic designer Henk Nieborg got an in-house job at Thalion. According to Nieborg, "landing your first real job in the gaming industry was pretty much unreal to me". He also said that "Eric Simon (producer/artist/designer) at Thalion somehow recognized our talent and had bigger plans for us. A thing we didn't see in ourselves yet". Kloibhofer and Nieborg were fans of Japanese action games like Super Mario, Castlevania, Super Contra, Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Castle of Illusion. Thalion producer Eric Simon describes Lionheart as a game "created out of passion". It was a project born from the desire of Kloibhofer and Nieborg to make "a really outstanding action game for the Amiga", the type of game "that we would buy ourselves on a console".

Just before joining Thalion, Nieborg drew a 16-color tileset/background and designed the protagonist of the game, Valdyn, on his Amiga 500 as preliminary work for their next project. Development for the game began in November 1991 with Thalion having two major goals. From a technical and graphical standpoint, they wanted to do what they've been doing since their demoscene days and push the hardware to its limits. In terms of gameplay, they wanted to test and showcase all the experience and skills they had cultivated over the years, since they decided to make the transition into game development. Erik Simon called it an "ambitious" and "non profit-oriented" project, openly admitting in a 1993 interview that, even though "we hope to get our development costs back, we don't believe in it". In terms of inspiration, Kloibhofer and Nieborg noted "we are of course aware that the best action games come from Japan. So we thought it made more sense to immerse ourselves in the best console games than in the best home computer games".

According to Kloibhofer and Nieborg, Erik Simon had the idea for Lionheart and also "edited and designed practically the entire game". As they recall, "Eric really pushed our talent in a positive way and the level of quality compared to our first game 'Ghost Battle' was almost unreal when you put them side by side". In a 2002 interview, Erik Simon described the development process as "one of these rare projects where everything just came together perfectly", saying that he was grateful to work on Lionheart. Erwin Kloibhofer was the main programmer, while Henk Nieborg was the visual artist during the development. Michael Bittner was responsible for intro and the 3D scrolling, while Matthias Steinwachs scored the soundtrack. Jurie Horneman wrote the story and also provided ideas for the game and Dieter Rottermund was in charge of the cover illustration. In the March 1993 issue of Play Time, Kloibhofer and Nieborg mention that also helpful were Matthias Mörstedt, "the master of sound routines", as well as Wolfgang Breyha and Reinhardt Franz, "without whom the program would not run on 1 MB machines".

Release

Lionheart was supposed to be ready in the summer of 1992, but "when the quality of the game began to show", Thalion's managing director, Willi Carmincke, "was also enthusiastic", and the game was postponed to Christmas release date. The game was eventually released in January 1993 and Thalion explicitly used it to test if the piracy-ridden Amiga market was able to sustain ambitious action games. The development team stated that, if the Amiga users decide to copy a game with so much effort put into it, then "Lionheart will be our last action game on the Amiga. But before we have to say goodbye to the Amiga, we want to make sure that we are at least missed".

In a 1993 interview with The One, Erik Simon said that Thalion didn't even bother copy-protecting Lionheart, "because there's no point in simply delaying the pirates from cracking the games and sticking them on bulletin boards. If the Amiga users don't change their way of thinking about pirating games, the machine will disappear from the market. We're trying to offer a fair amount of quality and we don't copy protect our games because we don't want to punish honest customers with funny protection methods. Copy protection won't change people's minds".

Reception

GamesMaster described Lionheart as "a technical marvel which looks, sounds and plays like a dream". They praised the number of moves the player can perform and the fact that they are all useful depending on the situation, comparing Valdyn's diverse moveset to what players would find in a fighting game. They called the graphics "astounding", arguing that "Thalion have squeezed all the graphic power out of the Amiga" and praised the game's audio for offering "high quality atmospheric music" and "very convincing sound effects". They rated it 90%, concluding that "it's very hard to find anything bad to say about it", and "with all the cutesy platform games that seem to be the rage right now, it's nice to see an old fashioned hacker popping up. Sure, it's not a new theme, but this far exceeds anything else in the genre".

The One agreed and gave Lionheart an overall score of 91%, stating that it's "without a doubt, the finest example of its kind, mainly because it actually tries to introduce some degree of originality into the gameplay rather than simply being content to just bombard the gamer with large sprawling levels and calling it 'a challenge' ... The variety of the game is amazing - one minute you can be swinging from vines, hacking at monsters, the next leaping up a giant tower as a bursting river creeps higher". The One praised the diversity of the levels, as well as the difficulty levels' feature where the layout of platforms differ on different modes of difficulty, stating they "provide a level of longevity the likes of which we haven't seen before". They also praised the convenient placement of checkpoints, and the music, calling it "amazingly orchestrated".

According to Computer and Video Games, "Thalion has gone and turned in an extremely challenging variation on the old theme", with "excellent graphics" and enough depth "to keep you going for weeks". On top of that, "the double ending gives the player extra incentive to play the game beyond completion". They gave it a score of 92%, with Paul Anglin commenting that "the only slight niggle I have with Lionheart is that some parts of the game are so frustratingly hard that it takes ages before you can even see what you're supposed to do, let alone actually be able to do it", but also said that Lionheart is "excellent" game. Amiga Force had similar feelings about the game. They called it "good news for just about everybody", explaining that "hard drive owners will be chuffed because it's installable; platform freaks will love it 'coz there's plenty of precipices to topple and bounce from; arcade fans will be dribbling over all the things you can kill", and said it is "fast, fun, frantic and good to look at. Lionheart excels in all aspects". They gave it a score of 90% noting that, if they had to criticize anything, it would be "the absence of level codes" and the fact that "occasionally certain moves are tricky to access".

Legacy

Valdyn is a playable character in Ambermoon, a 1993 role-playing video game also from Thalion. He is a Ranger.

An avid fan from France has programmed several versions of Lionheart for Windows. "Lionheart Remake Evolved" expands the game using additional graphics provided by Henk Nieborg. On the other hand, "Lionheart Remake Enhanced" attempts to provide a faithful port of the original game, while offering options like higher resolutions and transparencies in place of interlacing effects. The same author has started another remake in Java, which promises better compatibility.

Following the release of Lionheart, Erwin Kloibhofer, Henk Nieborg and Matthias Steinwachs created Flink (1994) for the Mega Drive. In 1996, Kloibhofer and Nieborg collaborated one last time on Lomax for the PlayStation and Windows.