Rollerball

[+Atarius Maximus]

Here's a new game I put together in the last few days. It's still in need of some polish, but it's pretty complete. You control a ball that you must navigate down through multiple levels to get to the goal at the bottom of the screen, avoiding moving obstacles along the way. It's got 12 levels built in, but at this point there aren't very many differences between the levels, and the difficulty doesn't scale up yet -- simple things to change that I'll add in later. After clearing all 12 levels, the game ends. Scoring is based on 100 points for each platform you clear, and 1010 points are awarded for beating a level. The title screen also needs some work - I just wanted something in there as a placeholder. I was thinking I might add a timer to add a sense of urgency to beating a level, I could use that nifty new mini-kernel in v1.0 to display a countdown bar, too!

 

This is based on the multisprite kernel, so it's all single colored sprites and playfields. I re-used lots of code from my Jumper game, so the development time on this was very short. Because I re-used lots of code, the comments that are copied in are completely wrong, and I've got hundreds of lines simply commented out - I'd like to do some major code cleanup before I post the source.

 

I'm going to be out of town for the next week, so I won't be able to update this for awhile, but I wanted to share what I've done so far. Let me know what you think!

 

Steve

rollerball.bin

[gambler172]

Hi

nice game.

greetings gambler172

[Dan Iacovelli]

cool game

[Jess Ragan]

Nice graphics! I'm suddenly overwhelmed with an intense need for a 2600 version of Pick Axe Pete.

 

JR

[+Atarius Maximus]

Thanks guys, glad you like it. I just updated the game with a timer and lives counter using the "pfscore1/2" options. Using pfscore frees up another sprite for me, as I could remove the sprite life counter I was using before. I haven't thought of anything else to use it for yet... Right now, the moving sprites are placed in a way that avoids any flicker - if I add one more moving barrier it would definitely cause some flicker.

 

You now have about 15 seconds to finish each level with a countdown bar at the lower right. I also made some changes to the level designs, although that's far from complete. I'm leaving on my trip in about 4 hours, so no more updates for about a week. Viva Las Vegas!!

 

Steve

rollerball2.bin

[SeaGtGruff]

Thanks guys, glad you like it. I just updated the game with a timer and lives counter using the "pfscore1/2" options. Using pfscore frees up another sprite for me, as I could remove the sprite life counter I was using before. I haven't thought of anything else to use it for yet... Right now, the moving sprites are placed in a way that avoids any flicker - if I add one more moving barrier it would definitely cause some flicker.

 

You now have about 15 seconds to finish each level with a countdown bar at the lower right. I also made some changes to the level designs, although that's far from complete. I'm leaving on my trip in about 4 hours, so no more updates for about a week. Viva Las Vegas!!

 

Steve

One thing I noticed while playing the first version is that the title screen started out correctly, but after you die and the title screen is displayed again, a few of the pixels are in the wrong place. :?

 

Michael

[+Atarius Maximus]

Thanks guys, glad you like it. I just updated the game with a timer and lives counter using the "pfscore1/2" options. Using pfscore frees up another sprite for me, as I could remove the sprite life counter I was using before. I haven't thought of anything else to use it for yet... Right now, the moving sprites are placed in a way that avoids any flicker - if I add one more moving barrier it would definitely cause some flicker.

 

You now have about 15 seconds to finish each level with a countdown bar at the lower right. I also made some changes to the level designs, although that's far from complete. I'm leaving on my trip in about 4 hours, so no more updates for about a week. Viva Las Vegas!!

 

Steve

One thing I noticed while playing the first version is that the title screen started out correctly, but after you die and the title screen is displayed again, a few of the pixels are in the wrong place. :?

 

Michael

 

Yeah, I noticed that, I just haven't attempted to fix it yet. My first thought is that it has to do with using pfheight=0, which seems to be buggy. I should probably re-do it at a lower resolution. Either way, I'm having more fun working on the game itself first, I'll probably finish up the title screen last. I'll go ahead and post the source if you're curious to take a look, just know that it's pretty messy, and most of the comments should be ignored.

 

Steve

rollerball2.txt

[SeaGtGruff]

One thing I noticed while playing the first version is that the title screen started out correctly, but after you die and the title screen is displayed again, a few of the pixels are in the wrong place. :?

 

Michael

 

Yeah, I noticed that, I just haven't attempted to fix it yet. My first thought is that it has to do with using pfheight=0, which seems to be buggy.

I figured it out-- sort of. I know how to fix it with a workaround, but I think there's a bug (or timing glitch?) in the kernel that needs to be fixed.

 

What I did was watch the code executing in Stella's debugger, and I noticed that on the lines where the title's playfield pixels seem to be misaligned, the playfield registers are not being written to-- so it isn't a problem with the pixels being shifted into the wrong positions, it's a problem where the previous line of playfield pixels is being duplicated because the playfield registers aren't updated.

 

I had also noticed that the colors were off at the top of the title screen.

 

The only thing that's different about the first time the title is displayed and the subsequent times the title is displayed is that the players are all positioned at 0,0 the first time (because page zero is being cleared on startup), but the player positions are *not* reset to 0,0 after the death sequence-- you're just setting the player data to 0 so they won't display.

 

So I added a few lines to reset the player positions to 0,0 in the title sequence, and it fixed it:

 

title
 rem --------------------------
 rem TITLE SCREEN
 rem --------------------------
 rem 
 rem reset all sprite positions to 0,0 <------ added the next 4 lines here
 rem
 player0x=0:player0y=0:player1x=0:player1y=0:player2x=0:player2y=0
 player3x=0:player3y=0:player4x=0:player4y=0:player5x=0:player5y=0
 rem
 rem PFSCORE1 - value to the left of the score
 rem 168 sets it to use three separate dots
 rem
 pfscore1=42

 

Michael

[+Atarius Maximus]

I'm back from my trip, and I've made a few more changes to the game. The ball is now animated, the layouts of the first four levels were updated, an extra obstacle was added at the bottom (if your ball falls into the "bucket", you lose a life), the title screen was changed, and a few other minor refinements were made to add some polish to the game.

 

The screenshot of the title screen didn't come out very well, as the title flickers.

 

Enjoy!

rollerball9.txt

rollerball9.bin