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You can't catch me!


batari

3,054 views

My 2600 projects are piling up like the snow that hasn't been falling here, despite freezing weather and predictions from meteorologists. But the analogy doesn't work without snow, which one must shovel away in layers, starting with the freshest layer first. So imagine four games piled up, Superbug on top, with Twisty Passages, RallyB and Zirconium II all below. I did work on some snow (if you catch my drift) and the work snowballed into a new game idea. Superbug is parked for a while, Twisty Passages is lost in a maze of complexity and limitations, RallyB went up in smoke and Zr2 lost its luster. I promise this is the last shiny object, and that there aren't any more puns in this paragraph.

 

This game is based on the children's story, the Gingerbread Man, and while the game should be appropriate for children, it's not child's play - it should be plenty challenging for adults. I assume the story is old enough to be public domain.

 

Anyway, I'll post the binary - it's 8k and will not grow any larger (think Econobanking). There are 16 levels, 3 minor bosses and one final boss.

 

Level 1: You're in the oven. Pick up the oven pans and use them to extinguish the fire creatures so someone will open the oven, and then you make your escape into the house. Watch out for the burners!

 

Level 2: You're in the house. Collect the balloons and float up to the roof. Watch out for the dog and cat.

 

Level 3: You're on the roof. How are you going to get down? A nearby tree maybe? Look out for the cats and the pesky mother bird that is seeking food for its fledgling.

 

Level 4: You're in the trees but you can't get around them. Don't touch the fledgling for too long or you may upset its mother. How do you get out of the woods? Maybe the falling leaves, the exposed tree root and worms can help?

 

Minor boss: A pig wants to eat you. Throw what you can at it. Also, you have managed to tick off the mother bird, who now really wants to make a meal of you. Later bosses might include a horse and a cow, but I haven't managed to make any with just 8 pixels.

 

So you've discouraged the boss from eating you, but alas, you have been caught and put back in the oven to cook a little longer, and the heat's been turned up!

 

If you can work your way through 19 screens, you may get to match wits with the wily fox... Well, not yet, with this version, I have no idea what you'll see since this screen isn't finished.

 

The basic gameplay is there, and it took two months of working an hour or three a day to get there, but there's no score, you have infinite lives and time, there's very little sound, and overall the game needs polishing, but I think I will actually finish this one. If I do, it will be my first independent homebrew!

 

If anything is too easy, too hard or just freakin' impossible, let me know. If there are bugs, please tell me. Sprite suggestions are welcome, especially an 8-pixel, double- or quad-width horse, pig and cow, but not for the cats, which I am quite proud of...

 

EDIT: minor changes in file below:

image_caps.zip

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Here are some Stella 2.2 save states.

 

http://www.cheeptech.com/misc/2600pi...inger_saves.zip

 

Slot 0 - End of third round (just carry the leaf over to the others)

Slot 1 - End of fourth round (go up to where the baby bird is)

Slot 2 - Beginning of boss wave

Slot 3 - Just after killing the bird in boss wave (but the bird reappears, so it's only a brief respite - although I guess on the plus side, you get to kill him over and over again) :)

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Too frustrating to be fun. Fun concept, though.

 

Something that would really help would be: make it easier to move around the levels. Too many of the platforms are barely reachable; it requires too much precision while you are dodging the @#$&ing bird.

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save states helped - finally made it past the 4th level. I think you'll need to do something(maybe sound effect) to make it more obvious that something important happened when you jump on the root while carrying a leaf.

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I think you'll need to do something(maybe sound effect) to make it more obvious that something important happened when you jump on the root while carrying a leaf.

Agreed. Maybe lowering the pitch of a "boing" sound effect with each subsequent jump.

 

Also, I think for the first pass through the levels, it shouldn't require so many leaves to be able to get through levels 3 and 4. Or the bird should be slower. Or, as Bob mentioned, the jumps should be more forgiving. As it is, I feel like I'm forcing the character to jump through tree limbs in level 4, as if I'm trying to exploit a bug in the game, not make jumps as they were intended.

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I think you'll need to do something(maybe sound effect) to make it more obvious that something important happened when you jump on the root while carrying a leaf.

Agreed. Maybe lowering the pitch of a "boing" sound effect with each subsequent jump.

 

Also, I think for the first pass through the levels, it shouldn't require so many leaves to be able to get through levels 3 and 4. Or the bird should be slower. Or, as Bob mentioned, the jumps should be more forgiving. As it is, I feel like I'm forcing the character to jump through tree limbs in level 4, as if I'm trying to exploit a bug in the game, not make jumps as they were intended.

A boing sound that changes pitch is a good idea - I can do that.

 

I designed many of the jumps to be barely reachable (e.g. the vent pipes on the house, or some of the upper limbs on the trees) but I could make these easier to reach if all they do is frustrate. I don't want to limit the number of leaves you need to get because I don't want players to whip through levels in 30 seconds.

 

Changing too many things may make the game too easy though. Average players should not be able to get through the first 4 levels the first time they play and nobody should be able to beat the whole game in a single evening unless your name is Todd Rogers. But the game should not induce anyone to throw the cart out the window either.

 

Also, you may be having more trouble with level 4 because the mother bird will get pissed off if you touch her baby for too long, and then she will begin to track you. I'm sure nobody noticed this since there is no warning or indication that the mother bird is pissed off.

 

I suppose I can use the difficulty switch to slow down the bird, but I'd have to think of how the difficulty switch could affect levels 1 and 2 as well. Any ideas?

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It's fine for some jumps to be difficult, but just traversing the screen shouldn't be an exercise in frustration.

 

Best design would have all main regions of the screen fairly easily reachable with several shortcuts that are difficult to traverse or get trapped.

 

A few more comments/suggestions:

 

Level 1: This level starts off difficult and gets easier. I don't think that's a good design. Narrative: At first you have four fires to dodge, plus the side-fire, plus search the screen for the pan. Frantic arcade action! At the end of the level you have a single fire on the bottom and you just sit in the middle waiting for the pan to appear, you run over and grab it (occasionally swearing when you get blind-sided by the side-fire), and then sit, in no danger, in the middle of the screen and try to loft the pan on the bottom fire. Inevitably, you miss, so repeat 3-5 times until you hit him. Boring. Increase the fires' speed as they get picked off or something. And, as I hinted, I think the fire on the side is a neat idea but it is too much of a cheap shot. The placement of the platforms is pretty good, though forcing most ascents/descents to the sides encourages the cheap shots I'm talking about.

 

2nd level: Pretty good design here, though I think adding the bird would help (maybe restrict the bird to the upper portion of the screen). As it is, the entire upper half of the screen is a safe haven. It's also easy to get trapped on the bottom just to the right of where you begin, which kinda sucks.

 

3rd level: I haven't played the version where you can't duck; I can't imagine the horror of playing this level without being able to duck! ;) Pretty good design for this level - it was frustrating at first but I can beat it pretty easily now - multiple paths is good: two ways to get to the center (around the outside and up from the bottom or down through the hole at the top). The bird is annoying but isn't impossible - there is plenty of room to avoid it.

 

4th level: I haven't beaten this level; not for lack of trying. This level looks great, the trees are very cool - but with the bird chasing you, there just isn't any room to avoid it. Once you go down, either on one of the sides or down the middle, there is almost no room to maneuver and if the bird comes for you you're farked. :) Very frustrating. Here is where the difficult jumps started to drive me mad - I'm frantically trying to dodge the bird, trying to catch an erratic, falling leaf - knowing that if it reaches the ground, forcing me to go down a hole to get it, I'm screwed - and I miss every third jump.

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I agree about not wanting to make the game too easy. I think that's a problem that crops up in numerous 2600 games. But making the character being able to jump even one pixel farther (further?) would help, since you wouldn't have to position your character exactly in one spot to make a jump. I think that would help ease the frustration.

 

The biggest thing that would help the "throw the cart across the room" frustration level at this point is not having the level reset each time you die. I understand this is in development, but that's the single biggest frustration factor for me. Getting 5 or 6 leaves, then dying and having to start all over. That's why I started using Save States, and it made the game much more enjoyable.

 

Difficulty switch wise, on level 1, you could use it to control the frequency of the oven flame, or the speed of the flame critters. On level 2, it could control the speed of the dog (or cat).

 

I noticed the warning about not touching the baby bird in your first post, so I just avoided it. But some warning that the mother bird was angry would help. How about having the bird "tweet", and the tweets could increase in frequency and/or pitch the angrier it gets? Also, how about if you left the baby bird alone for awhile, the mother calms back down?

 

A note on level 1 - sometimes a pan will appear on the outside edge of the lower level, where you can't get to it without dying. How about having the pans expire after a certain amount of time, so if one gets into a bad spot, you can ignore it and wait for a better one?

 

Also, on level 2 - do the balloons change placement as you progress through the game? I think if you set them up so they'd change locations, that would help add some variety in that level. Currently, it's the only level where the objects are fixed, and once you figure them out, the level becomes just another pattern to execute.

 

Maybe the balloons could even drift around within set limits, rather than just be stationary.

 

Anyway, despite all my whining ;) , I think it's shaping up to be a very cool game. It's got some neat ideas, and has a lot of potential.

 

I'd really like to see AtariVox support for this. It'd be great to hear the Gingerbread Man scream in agony as he caught fire or got eaten. ;)

 

Another thought - instead of just disappearing, could the Gingerbread Man actually be eaten by whatever catches him? That animation would go great with some crunching sounds. :)

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RallyB went up in smoke

 

Talking about Rally-X and "smoke", what was your plan for that actually?

 

I played some rounds of NRX yesterday, and thought that the 3rd (Challenging) stage probably already shows the max. enemy cars, which by my count were 7. I'll try and see if I can make it to the next Challenging stage, to see wether there's even more.

 

I think you rarely/never see more than 3 enemy cars at once though, so your demo was quite in order in this regard.

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So, I really got into the game, making it up to level 13. There's never been more than 7 red cars on the screen though. There's 2 more "Challenging Stages", #7 and #11, but they just increase the number of rocks, it's always 7 cars.

 

Besides smoke seem the rocks to be the major other/same problem, or?

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RallyB went up in smoke

 

Talking about Rally-X and "smoke", what was your plan for that actually?

 

I played some rounds of NRX yesterday, and thought that the 3rd (Challenging) stage probably already shows the max. enemy cars, which by my count were 7. I'll try and see if I can make it to the next Challenging stage, to see wether there's even more.

 

I think you rarely/never see more than 3 enemy cars at once though, so your demo was quite in order in this regard.

I totally missed this comment until I updated my blog!

 

Anyway, the "smoke" could be flickering PF blocks, though it would probably look crappy.

 

It might be possible to track more cars and simply display a max of 3 onscreen. RAM is going to be the deciding factor, as it will take at least 2 bytes for each additional car.

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I totally missed this comment until I updated my blog!

 

No problem. I had some fun playing the game at the time, so I wanted to share some thoughts :)

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