Entry posted by SpiceWare
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On October 29, 2007 I was invited to take part in the 5th annual AtariAge Holiday Cart. The plan for the cart to feature a number of mini games with a slick menu to tie the games together. I contacted my nephew Justin for some game ideas and he suggested "You're Frosty collecting stuff" and "You're Rudolf, running away from the other reindeer because they're taunting you".
I then started perusing the private Holiday Cart forum and came upon this idea that Nathan Strum had posted a week earlier:
I got the idea while playing Gingerbread Man.
You control a snowman, and you must keep him from melting. For some reason, there are fireballs chasing you around. Hey... it's a video game. Nobody questions Pac-Man's world, right?
Anyway, it's a platformer, where you have to pick up blocks of ice to keep you from melting. You begin in the bottom left corner of the screen. You can jump to platforms, and jump over fireballs, if there's enough room. Otherwise, you have to avoid them through timing, or go right through them. Going through them makes you melt a little.
I think the platforms (and maybe the ice blocks) could be done using the playfield. Although it's going to be asymmetrical. So I'm not sure about that.
The game starts out at night. So you don't melt without hitting a fireball - yet. It'd be great to have snow falling in the sky (like the Toyshop Trouble title screen). Or at least stars.
As you melt, you leave an expanding trail of water behind. I think the snowman's missile could be used for this. But I'm guessing at that.
As for the orange nose, I was wondering if the fireball's missile could be used for this (another guess). They're orange, so the color would be right. (Same thing in the extra lives remaining, if possible. Otherwise, I can live without the carrot. But it would be cool looking.)
As the game progresses, the moon sets and the sun starts to rise. Now, you begin to slowly melt whether you hit a fireball or not. Also, some of the platforms move back and forth (maybe?) and some of them are too low to get through, unless you intentionally melt a little bit.
So in this one, on the second platform up, you have to melt a little to get to the far left block. You must clear all blocks, then exit the bottom right side of the screen to clear a level.
As the sun rises, the temperature continues to climb, and then the ice blocks themselves begin to melt, so you re-gain less of your melted self each time. Gradually, the game returns to night, with harder level layouts, higher melting speeds, faster fireballs, etc. There'd probably need to be some end to it with a congratulatory screen after a certain number of levels. Maybe they could repeat a couple of times, just to lengthen the play time.
Oh, and the suns eyes would follow you back and forth.
It'd be fun to animate the snowman jumping and landing. He'd lend himself to some nice, bouncy animation.
Also, I'd thought that maybe the goal of the game could be to extinguish all of the fireballs, and the ice was there to replenish you from that. So you'd have to balance your ice supply with the number of fireballs you had to put out. And maybe some fireballs would take two hits, resulting in a smaller fireball first, before the second hit took it out completely.
In either case, the level designs would have to require you to figure out the best route to take. When to pick up ice, when to avoid fireballs, that sort of thing.
So there ya' go. That's my idea. I guess it's not so much a mini-game though. But maybe it'll spark some mini-game ideas.
The idea was extremely well thought out, and went along with my nephew's first suggestion, so I talked with Nathan then posted a message to the holiday cart forum to make sure nobody else had started to work on it. On the 30th I posted a screenshot, but no ROM or source, of the horizon routine:
On the 31st Nathan suggested the name of Stay Frosty and I implemented the score and reserve lives display so we'd know how much screen space we had for the levels themselves. I also realized that "Using Missile 1 for the nose means we can't double or triple the fireball sprite - unless they flicker."
ROM:
frosty071031.bin
Source:
sf_source071031.zip
Blog entry covers October 29-31, 2007
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