The bottomless pit (part 2)

Entry posted by atari2600land August 2, 2018

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I spent most of yesterday working on the game. I tested it on real hardware. It was a case of the platforms getting too close to each other, causing garbled characters. On the Odyssey 2, if characters overlap, you get that. So I tried to fix it by making it so if the y position is too close, move it up more. I went to bed with a broken game.

I woke up, and started anew. I had the bright idea of putting a noise in so I would know my code would be working. I thought I had it, but I went to test on my machine. Nope. Frustrated, I finally got an idea. Instead of forcing the Y position of the character UPWARDS, move the X position LEFT more. That way it still wouldn't overlap. What a dummy I've been. So I tried that. Success. In my testing on a real machine, not once did one character get all garbled up.

But there's still one thing I've noticed. I suck at the game. And another thing I've noticed is the little bit of static on the top of the screen when I go to play it. When I went to get my Odyssey 2 out of the garage, I accidentally dropped the C7050 cart onto the hard ground. I thought I had broken it. But instead of breaking it, it just deleted the contents of what it had before. It still works. So that's good, especially since the guy who made it left the Odyssey 2 scene, so I can't get another one if I wanted one.

As for making an array of y positions and seeing if there's a match, I think that would be too hard for my puny brain to do. I've struggled to get this far. And besides, I'd probably break what I have now. It's a miracle it let me put the y position checking in at the end and have it still work. I've used 1,350 bytes. What can I do to make the game better? I think that bit of static at the top is due to the Odyssey 2 thinking too hard.

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