Tapeworm-like game

[+atari2600land]

I'm working on a game like Tapeworm for the Atari 2600, and I need a little help. Right now, when you eat a treat, the worm is supposed to grow by one pfblock, which it does, but it does it on its own time. What I want is for it to do it automatically. How would I achieve this?

nybbles3a.bas.bin

nybbles3a.bas

[supercat]

I'm working on a game like Tapeworm for the Atari 2600, and I need a little help. Right now, when you eat a treat, the worm is supposed to grow by one pfblock, which it does, but it does it on its own time. What I want is for it to do it automatically. How would I achieve this?

 

How are you keeping track of the worm segments? A tapeworm-style game is unlikely to get very hard unless the worm can get quite long, and the 2600 doesn't really have a whole lot of spare RAM.

[MausGames]

I think there are probably a few good ways to track a worm up to a certain length. I agree though that this would be the biggest obstacle in recreating this game in bB. I don't know of any other way to store and retrieve the movement history of a sprite in ram than to use a bunch of if-thens, it's beyond my abilities. With the superchip the length would be around 30 segments, without the superchip I'd say around 8 max.

 

Since games like this take up such a small amount of rom, I think it would be cool to see a superchip multicart with a bunch of these smaller games on it.

Edited February 13, 2009 by MausGames

[+batari]

Just have an X,Y for the end of the snake, then 2 bits for each cardinal direction toward the head as 00, 01, 10, 11. That's 2 bytes (or 12 bits if you really want to get technical) for the first segment and one byte for every additional 4. With Superchip, you could have a decent game. With regular RAM, you could also have a reasonably long snake - as the playfield isn't very big to begin with.

[+atari2600land]

How are you keeping track of the worm segments? A tapeworm-style game is unlikely to get very hard unless the worm can get quite long, and the 2600 doesn't really have a whole lot of spare RAM.

I'm keeping track of the worm segments by what direction the player is moving when a timer reaches a certain point, then storing that info and retrieving it when it's needed, thus making the worm move. If I wanted to, I could make the worm even longer with variables u-y. If you look at my .bas file, you'll see that I could make it about twice as long as the longest it gets now because I'd use these variables as u{0}, u{1}, etc.

 

Anyway, any help on my original question would be very much appreciated.

[lucifershalo]

what you should add to the game (if possible)

are those squares with points (positive or sometimes negative) that you have to hit to gain the bonus

that would be cool