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The Levee Game
In addition to programming Crackpots and the unreleased Keystone Kapers sequel Keystone Cannonball, Dan Kitchen also started developing a new game which was to once again star Officer Kelly. However instead of endlessly chasing after his arch nemesis Harry Hooligan, this game would have seen Officer Kelly taking a nice quiet job guarding a large dam. What could possibly go wrong? After admiring the beautifully drawn sunset with moving clouds you'll suddenly see the warning lights at the top of the dam flash red and cracks will start to appear in the walls. It's up to Officer Kelly to run up and down the ladders to reach each of these cracks and quickly patch them before water starts filling up the screen. For some reason Officer Kelly has lost his ability to jump (perhaps his snazzy new rain slicker is too heavy?) but he can still run and climb. Once you move Kelly to where the crack is, the player needs to push up to patch the crack. New cracks appear every six seconds and a maximum of five cracks can be on the screen at one time (one on each level). Each crack takes about four seconds to patch so if you're fast you can somewhat stay ahead of the new cracks that form. Each time Officer Kelly patches a crack he'll gain 10 points Despite Kelly's best efforts, water will eventually begin to accumulate at the bottom of the screen. Thankfully the water isn't deadly so Kelly can safely go down to the flooded levels to patch cracks although it can be hard to see what's going on. The more cracks there are, the faster the water will fill up the screen and once the water reaches the top of the dam it's game over. You'll also notice that on the sides of the screen there appear to be barrels, these can be pushed using the fire button and can be positioned under the cracks. Once a barrel is under the leaking crack the water level will stop rising and Officer Kelly can work on patching things up. In this early prototype the barrels seem to be able to hold an infinite amount of water but in the final version they would overflow and need to be emptied some how. As it stands there really isn't any reason to use the barrels since the player can easily keep up with the forming cracks. In addition to the barrels there's an alarm bell with a pull chain at the top right of the screen. By positioning Officer Kelly underneath it and pulling down (the positioning is a bit fiddly) the player can lower the water level of the dam by opening up the sluice gates at the bottom of the screen. It is assumed that in the final version there would have been some sort of limit on the use of this. Although there's a fair bit of gameplay implemented in this early prototype, there are still a lot of unfinished elements. The biggest being that there also doesn't seem to be any sort of levels or progression in the game so the player can simply patch cracks over and over again until they grow tired. There is no music in the game and the only sound effect is for when new cracks appear. There are two variations the player can select but both are the same (most likely just a placeholder). Dan had also planned to have a life/air meter for when Kelly was under water so the player could not stay there indefinitely.
So why was the Levee Game never completed? According to Dan he got pulled off onto other higher priority projects like Apple II ports so he was never able to get back and finish the game. It's hard to judge a game so early in its development cycle, but one has to wonder what other gameplay elements would have been added to make the game feel more complete. The frantic pace of trying to keep up with the cracks in the levee is a nice start, but without any sort of enemy to fend off or avoid the game feels a bit flat. As it stands the Levee Game is a nice tech demo and an interesting glimpse into what might have been.
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