This week we've released desktop versions of The Pawn Remastered on Itch.io. Versions are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Android and iOS are soon to follow.

Wait! This sounds all too familiar! The Pawn already has been remastered and released quite some time ago?!?

Well, yes, indeed. So what is going on? The fellow followers of this little project know about the previous remasters of The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, and Jinxter. And the incredible adventure with rescuing the games' source code. If you take a walk back through our short history, you might get aware again that the source codes were recovered after the remastering of The Pawn was done. The Pawn Remastered was what we called it internally a "binary" remaster. The remastered version operated on the binary release version of the game and was not rebuilt from the source code. This imposed some limitations on what was possible to change in the remastered version.

After the rescue of the source codes, there was the ongoing feeling that The Pawn deserves a source remaster as well. And because recent operating system changes made an update necessary anyway, we decided to remaster The Pawn Remastered. As a little Thank you to all the great people in the Strandgames community, we also back-ported some of the often requested features from Guild of Thieves and Jinxter.

The source remaster of The Pawn had some special challenges compared to the Guild of Thieves and Jinxter remasters. You might remember our blog entry covering the fred23jr tool, which was an important tool in the development process. However, fred23jr did not exist yet when The Pawn was written in 1984. Since some of our new features were partly relying on fred23jr customisations, we had to work out new ways to implement these. We think the result went pretty well and we hope you enjoy it. Of course the new version is a free update. The desktop versions should be on Itch now, the mobile versions are soon to follow.

The Pawn Remastered 3.3 features:

• Remastered from The Pawn original source code
• Ambient sounds with new adjustable volume
• Improved sound handling on Linux
• Item icons
• Option to put text below graphics

Platform notes:

• Android: Now available both in 32bit and 64bit
• Linux: Optimised sound handling, the new AppImage should be working on many recent 64bit distros
• macOS: Ready for Catalina, supports dark mode now
• iOS: Savegame import fixed

Important Note

The save game files of the previous The Pawn remaster are unfortunately not compatible with the new version, since the game foundation has changed.