What is NewPAL?

NewPAL is an RPG game (Role Play Game) developed by the NEOLITH team. NewPal consists of a DOS-executable game engine and several tools for designing story, image, map and fight resources that are used by the game engine. In May 1998, the NEOLITH team was awarded the first prize for NewPal in the 5th Software Competition of the University of Science and Technology of China.

There were seven NEOLITH members in early years. They are Hui Guo (郭辉), Guoping Hu (胡国平), Jingfeng Yang (杨敬峰), Chang Xu (许畅), Bin Yang (杨斌), Jili Zhang (张继立) and Xiaohai Liu (刘晓海). Hui Guo is our team core who led us through numerous difficulties in the game development and always gave us strong encouragement. He is responsible for developing the game framework. Guoping Hu is a genius in constructing 3D scenarios from plain 2D images. He provided quite a few convenient tools to facilitate the task of designing game maps. Jingfeng Yang and Chang Xu are two logic masters who built a complex event-processing mechanism to handle arbitrary condition-effect relationships for the game story. They paid much effort in testing and debuging the story logic. Bin Yang and Jili Zhang together acted as the story designer and image organizer for the game. They are experts in designing the game story and finding hidden bugs for the game engine. Xiaohai Liu implemented the whole instant-fight mechanism by himself and created new magic effects that did not even exist in the original PAL. He is also our chief technology officer as he seems to know everything in programming.

How about NewPAL?

We have not completely finished NewPal due to some difficulties including time and space restrictions, but a small demo built on this game engine is available. The demo tells a short yet interesting story in which you need to act as a cute girl, Yiru Li, who is the daughter of our idol Xiaoyao Li, to find out what is going on twelve years after the end of the original PAL. In the demo, you are able to enjoy again stealing hidden items everywhere by touching any valuable facilities you believe, and in some places, exploring secret entrances is inevitable. Besides, NewPAL adopts a novel instant-fight mechanism instead of the classic round-fight mechanism used in PAL. So remember to save your game progress periodically in case that you might get into trouble with hard fights.

Here are some pictures captured from the demo (the money unit below is one of our university's features, ^_^):

I want to take a look at NewPAL

NewPal is a DOS-based program developed using Borland C++ (V3.1) in early years. So you must make sure that your machine is running a proper OS such as MS Windows 95/98 that can support our game correctly (DOSBOX is also fine). There may be some strange problems if you try it in other operation systems. Another suggestion you may find useful is to read the README file before going directly into the demo. It covers some common questions you may encounter and raise later (e.g., what keys to use for controls in a battle).

Here it is: newpal.zip (1.2M)

More about NewPAL

If you want to learn more about NewPal, some additional documents (in Simplified Chinese) are available below:

Game Story, Game Dialogue, Development Journal, Event Process