atari2600land's Blog - Secret Government Waffle Project resumes

RSS Bot · November 6, 2016

Well, the government decided to resume its secret waffle project. And by "government," I mean me. I could have just gone and worked on the previous version some more, but as I recall, there were some problems with it that we couldn't work out, so I just decided to redo the whole thing. So new tune and new title screen. This is the second attempt at a waffle. The first one looked like a cherry pie. My goal with the "cherry pie" version was to have a two-toned waffle. But the orange-red color didn't work out and thus I inadvertently created a cherry pie. So a few hours later, I had this:

The machine. Oh my gosh that was hard. In the first version, the machine was blue. I didn't like it, I'd prefer it to be gray. So I tried to change it. It was successful except for the two GROM cards that I couldn't make gray. So I just made them GRAM cards. The bottom card I couldn't make it display correctly. But it looked great. So I just changed the top one to match the bottom one and it looks beautiful now.
Next up came the little man. I decided he should be an army man. After all, this is the government we're talking about. But something has gone wrong with the waffle-making machine the government uses to make waffles for the secret government waffle project: It spits out waffles. Too many. And it can't stop. But now Captain Kellogg is stuck in the waffle room about to meet his waffly doom. But having the will to live, he decides to dodge the waffles coming at him at a fantastic pace.
So, you've heard the story of where I came up with the title (it was a riff in MST3K: The Movie). Captain Kellogg is from the "song" "Yulenet". I wish there was a song about waffles that I could program into the game. So now the man is in there. Time for waffles.
One of the major problems I remember from the first version was that sometimes a wall of waffles came at you. So to prevent this, I put in some code that if waffle #5 came out the same time as waffle #4, delay waffle #5's entrance on the screen to make a gap that the cap'n can maneuver in.

I tested this on a real Intv and it looks great (except for the fact that my TV displays the colors too dark so blue looks like black.) But it's not done yet. There are still things I need to do.
Remember the powerups? I need to put them in. And make the score work. And then comes the fine-tuning. If I'm working at the pace I am now going, and judging from how fast Aaron the Aant was completed, I would hope for an early 2017 release if someone decided to release the game. One of the things I can't get over is the fact that GoSub remembers where you left off at. So:
Man - sprites 0 and 1
waffles - sprites 2-6
powerup - sprite 7
That makes 8 sprites total, the maximum allowed on the Intellivision.

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