Dragon's Breath (aka Dragon Lord in the USA).

Introduction

Dragon's Breath was a video game for the Amiga home computer developed in 1989 by myself and two others and released in 1990 by Palace Software. Ports to PC (we are talking XT here) and an Atari ST version were also made.

The Game

The game is a turn based fanatasy role playing game, played out in a 'hand of god' format. You get to choose to play one of three dragon lords (him, her and it) and play against friends or the computer. You are trying to hunt down the secret of immortaility hidden in the land of Anrea and to do this you breed dragons that can look for the talisman parts. However, to breed dragons costs money, and the best way to get money is to conquer the inhabitants of Anrea and tax them.

So the game mainly consists of first conquering villages, but then helping them grow (because you get more taxes that way), which means destroying the villages you don't own, because the inhabitants of Anrea are always at each others throat. And because there are three players doing this you get dragon to dragon conflicts as one dragon protects a village from another.

There is also the odd barbarian roaming the world ready to slaughter a dragon he comes across, and a princess that gets kidnapped.

Being turn based meant that you made all your decisions for each month (dragons fly by the light of the moons) regarding your spell stock and the health of your dragons and the missions you wished to take on that month. Then after all three players had done that you hit the go button and the simulation rolled out, as you watched the dragons on the map fly over the land and attack other.

Playing Today

You can play Dragons' Breath today via emulators for the Amiga and Atari ST, and also on your PC. The ROM images can be found on many sites like this one:- http://www.classic-pc-games.com/pc/strategy/dragon_breath_-_dragon_lord.html.

Beware of some of the Amiga images, they may work correctly, even if they appear to work. This is due to the original disk copy protection that sliently introduced flaws into the game if the protection was hacked, like the spell system always blowing up. The ones that still require you to enter words from the manual (usually supplied as well) are more likely to work.

Ratings and reviews

The game reviewed very well (HOL archive here) receiving a 91% from Zzapp (premier review magazine of its era) and in general was high 80's low 90's.

Surprising the game still rates fairly well in the abandonware universe. See the previous linked classic-ps-games.com for a user vote of 84%, very close to the release scores.

Authors

Andrew Bailey

Andrew was responsible for the main game concept and all programming. http://au.linkedin.com/in/andrewebailey

David Hanlon

David was responsibile for the music and sound effects. He also contributed to the design, especially finer points of the spell system, and the manual. David was also taxi, as he was the only one with a car. http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/david-hanlon/2/670/a03

Simon Hunter

Simon was the art dude, and brought his unique comic book style to the game. http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/simon-hunter/20/392/51A

Development Trivia

The game almost didn't make it because of hardware (harddisk) failure. The game was developed on an Amiga 2000 with a PC-XT bridge board provding the hard disk support. One day, after much time had passed since a backup, the hard disk just failed, and many hours of re booting didn't bring it back up. So I went on a long walk and resigned myself to a long session re-coding. When I got home I powered up the Amiga once more and the hard disk magically whirled into action. I quickly went and bought 50 floppy disks and backed up the hard disk. The hard disk didn't fail again, but I learnt my lesson and have been a backup fanatic ever since.

Links