Beasty Bytes - King's Valley Spy

King's Valley Level Editor: King's Valley Spy In 1988 Konami published a brilliant puzzle/action game called King's Valley II on the MSX1 and MSX2 machines. It was pretty unique in that it came with a nifty little level editor that allowed players to create and share custom levels. A level was saved in a binary format with the .ELG extension (short for El Giza). The game can still be played today on original MSX machines and several solid MSX emulators.

For the upcoming 30th anniversary of the game (and because I really couldn't help myself) I decided to perform some digital archeology of my own, and set out to decode the ELG file. My efforts have resulted in an MSX compatible King's Valley II level editor running on Windows. It adds some much needed functionality such as the ability to delete enemies, traps, rooms, as well as remove soul stones, change room layout, delete rooms and so on. It also makes editing a little more fun, adding zoom, automatic aligning, and the use of undo buffers.

Feature list

King's Valley Spy is a Windows based, MSX compatible King's Valley II level editor. It offers the following features over Konami's in-game editor:

Remove misplaced stones/tools/enemies/soul stones
Add and delete rooms
Change the room layout
Use multiple undo buffers
Fill or clear rooms and stages with one click
Zoom out for a bird's eye view
Right-mouse drag the level
Export level maps
Auto-adjust trap heights when bricks are added
Auto-fix overwritten or misplaced ladders
See the number of items left (soul stones/tools etc)
Add a room grid for outlining room borders
Add a brick grid for outlining rows and columns
View levels in classic 8bit styles (Vampire, Goons, Galious)*
Drag&Drop ELG files for fast load
Start from sample levels

(*) Won't be imported by the King's Valley II rom.

• Zoom in and out, see an overview of your entire level

Zoom in and out of a stage using F3/F4 for room-size fast zooming, or use the mouse scroll wheel for brick-size smooth zooming.

• View your level in different classic styles

Just for fun, and because you won't be able to help yourself either, check out what your level would look like in the graphics-styles of other classic 8 bit gems.

Goons

Galious

Vampire

• Export your level to an image file

Export your entire level directly to an image. No more tiring screen-grab-cut-and-paste sessions to make a level map.

Plans for upcoming releases

Nothing is set in stone, especially not how much time I'll be able to set aside to work on this project, but here are my current ideas for a release schedule:

• R2.5:

Preview play the character with brick and ladder interactions

Downloads

You may need to install the latest Microsoft re-distributable, if so, follow the link to the official MS installer below and choose your OS etc.

• King's Valley Spy 2.0

• Microsoft Re-distributable

• Spy v2.0 tutorial video
• Level GP2727 play-thru

Disclaimer

I spent many hair-pulling hours painstakingly recreating the graphics from scratch. I wanted them to look the way the original graphics looked to me, way back when, on a CRT TV. Although I'm very aware I far from succeeded, I hope it's clear that the graphics used in the Spy are mine. They are a homage to what I feel was a brilliant piece of coding and graphics design.