Back to Atari!
Well after getting sidetracked with animation for a few entries, it's back to some more on-topic stuff.Animation!...of Atari 2600 game sprites, that is. ;)I just sent off the first batch of exploding sprites to Manuel for Colony 7. I couldn't make huge, elaborate explosions due to the constraints, but I think what I came up with gets across the idea of stuff blowing apart pretty well.I'll also be working on some sprites for Chris' version of Juno First. This was a cool game I discovered while writing some reviews for Cinemarcade's "The Games That Time Forgot". Chris has made some great progress on the kernel already.The big project though, will be John's port of LadyBug. This is going to have a bunch of sprites in it. Here are some rips from the arcade game, to show you what I'll be dealing with...The LadyBug:The enemy bugs:And the LadyBug after running into an enemy bug:Each of the bug animations has four frames - but only three of them are unique. In each animation, one of the sprites gets used twice, so that will save me some work. And it'll save John some ROM space.But...I have to make two sets of each bug animation - horizontal and vertical. This is due the the 2600 not using square pixels. So that will take some doing. The death scene shouldn't be a problem, since only the first frame will be different for a horizontal or vertical death. The floating angel wings aren't animated (ie. flapping), they're just moved in a "fluttering" motion by the computer to give that illusion.In addition to the animation, there are also 18 vegetable sprites. Fortunately, they aren't animated. And then there's a title screen, letters, and some other stuff.That should keep me busy for awhile. I'd never played LadyBug before, but after getting into it for a few games, it's really different. It's hardly the Pac-Man rip-off that it appears to be on the surface. There's a lot more to the game than initially meets the eye, and it's quite a bit of fun.(I can already tell that the cricket and centipede are gonna give me trouble.)
8 Comments
Recommended Comments