Happening in the Garden (Pravetz-8D)

Happening in the Garden (Sluchka v Gradinata) is a game for Pravetz-8D which was published in the first Bulgarian computer magazine - "Computer for you", back in 1989. The idea is based on the IBM PC DOS game - Digger, which was popular in the 1980s on the Bulgarian IBM XT clone - Pravetz-16. The main character have to pick as many flowers as he can and run away from his pursuer. Stepping on the grass gives one point and picking a flower gives ten points. The game keeps the high score, until reboot or restart of the program. Despite written entirely in BASIC, the pursuer have very good and competitive artificial intelligence - great extra to the addictive game play. After picking all the flowers on the screen, a new level appears, but the pursuer is one step nearer to the main character. Reducing the distance between the characters, motivates the player to gain more score by stepping on the grass, before the pursuer is way too close to him on a later level, requiring some additional strategy.

The game graphics are only in black and white, and not many people had color monitors when the game was released. Graphics are done entirely in text mode by use of redefined character letters (pseudo graphic). The use of pseudo graphic had the advantage of smaller size and more speed of the entire game. For sound the Oric (Pravetz-8D) BASIC commands are used - PING and EXPLODE, taking advantage of the built-in sound chip (AY-3-8912A), not present in the other Bulgarian computer clones. In order the game to be small in size only capital letters are used. The small letters needed redefinition of the character set and were not popular on the 8 bit computers in Bulgaria, because the small Latin letters character set was used for Cyrillic equivalents. Happening in the Garden have remakes for Oric, Amiga, Apple 2 and Sinclair, each of them having peculiarities related to the specific platform.

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