Use a Notebook and pencil
Entry posted by Piggles
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I got back into coding after porting "Castle" from David Ahl's Creative Computing magazine to QuiteBasic. An excellent classic BASIC interpreter written in Javascript. Here's my game: Castle
Something I learned, at least for me, is that I can't code directly to the computer from scratch. I need a notebook. I need to be away from the computer, where there's no pressure to achieve a great deal and have a working program right off the bat. I got familiar with QuiteBasic, wrote a few simple programs to learn the syntax, and then I went to the notebook. I printed the syntax reference and used that as my guide. I spent a few weeks of lunch breaks working on it. Time at the doctor's waiting room, oil change waiting room, etc. It was rather fun. And productive. I found it easy to discard bad code and keep good code.
So the itch to create an atari game bit me again. I did not want to replay the damned Zombies debacle. You fine folks have made better adventure games since then. So I'm back to the notebook. I didn't print the Batari Basic manual, and so I did a little, and then sat down to code it. Tossed it. Tried again. Not so bad this time.
I initially envisioned a "ambient game" like Knytt but with a honey bee going around collecting rare flowers and encountering various creatures as part of the scenery. Worms, spiders, frogs, etc. Then I thought maybe a shorter, fetch-the-treasure game with a couple predators that hound you as you look for rare nectar from various flowers. I need to flush this out a bit before I continue. However, I'd like to make the code and bin available if you feel like you want to mess with it or use it for inspiration.
Use the trigger as you approach a flower to land on it. I envision a sucking sound and a score increase, but not sure. It just seemed right. The cyclescore indicated 2112 when I ran an early version, as you can see in the attachment. An excellent Rush album is a positive sign. Later, it indicated 1984, so I don't know if a classic Orwell novel is a good sign or not. This is all in humor, but I couldn't help but find it funny enough to take a picture.
There's a lot of opportunity to use various color schemes for terrain. I considered a wasp that chases you and drags you back to it's hive. Maybe a joystick jiggle routine to escape. Maybe a frog that leaps back and forth and tries to eat you if you get too close to the lily pads.
Enough rambling!
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