Van Helsing: A Night at Castle Dracula

Midnight. Professor Van Helsing has come to Castle Dracula with a whip in his hand. Before dawn he must cross the whole castle, one hour at a time: the graveyard, the chapel, the crypts, the library, the clock tower and the keep. Every room is a puzzle, and every chapter ends with something waiting for him.

• 36 rooms in six chapters, one for each hour of the night
• Six bosses, from the great wolf of the graveyard to the Count himself
• A whip, and a dagger, holy water, a cross, an axe and a stopwatch to find
• Music after Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Grieg, Holst, Saint-Saëns, Schubert and Tchaikovsky
• No manual needed: the game shows you what to do as each new thing comes up
• Disk, tape and EasyFlash cartridge, with an illustrated manual
• On tape, a proper turbo loader: a flashing border, the loading picture and its music

Made with passion, and a lot of work

Everyone's talking about AI slop, so here's the other side of it. Van Helsing was made with the help of Claude, an AI assistant, writing the code, graphics and music arrangements to my direction. The cover paintings were made with Leonardo.ai. The game went through 68 versions. Every boss was re-tuned again and again from my own play. It was tested on a real Commodore 64, and by 1,475 automated checks, including test players given a person's reaction time. Play it and judge for yourself. The story of how it was made: Can you make a good Commodore 64 game with AI?

You can play it in your browser too, in the Braindumps C64 emulator: choose Van Helsing from the menu.

Loading

• Disk: type LOAD"VAN HELSING",8 and press RETURN, then type RUN. Leave the disk in the drive: each chapter loads as you reach it.
• Tape: hold SHIFT and press RUN/STOP, then press PLAY. A turbo loader brings the game in, in about two minutes: the screen stripes, then the loading picture and its music, the border flashing. Each chapter is a file of its own further along the tape and loads in 20 to 30 seconds, so note the tape counter as each chapter's name appears.
• Cartridge: with the C64 switched off, plug it in, then switch on. The .crt is an EasyFlash cartridge, for VICE and for EasyFlash hardware such as the EasyFlash 3, Kung Fu Flash or Ultimate 64.
• In VICE: drop the .d64 or the .crt onto its window.

Controls

Use a joystick in either port, or the keyboard:

• A and D walk.
• W jumps; hold it for a higher jump.
• SPACE or K cracks the whip.
• S and SPACE together throw what you carry.
• Hold J to run.
• RUN/STOP starts the room again (it's Esc in VICE).
• M turns the music on or off on the title screen.

PAL only

Made for PAL Commodore 64s. On an NTSC machine it runs about 20% faster, with faster music.

A game by Steve Austen for Nightjar Software, after Bram Stoker's Dracula.