Flickertail's Blog - Broomsticks - Quidditch - Hockey

RSS Bot · December 8, 2017

After a hiatus of 10 years, I have returned to try to finish a game. Hopefully the Atari Age community will keep me motivated, because admittedly, the going will probably be somewhat slow.

Where to start? I don't know if I have any great original ideas for game. Especially one that has really great graphics, so my plan is to try to turn the real world game of hockey into a somewhat visually appealing VCS game with halfway decent game play.

I guess the ultimate goal would be to have a completely packaged cart for sale in the Atari Age store.

Why hockey? The reason I got started on this 10 years ago was that I was trying to make a tribute game to my brother, who had passed a few years earlier. Preferably something River Raid-ish because that was his favorite game back in the day.

But that's too hard, especially coming up with some kind of original version.

IDK... I've been trying to find a good sprite design for hockey player sprite, to be honest I couldn't come up with anything I liked. So I decided... "Well, Quidditch from the Harry Potter series has a lot in common with hockey." Three forwards... two defensemen (beaters)... a goalie... and I could revisit my old graphics from 10 years ago, back in HP was popular.

I thought my Quidditch player graphics were pretty decent, assuming you can suspend disbelief when starting the game. If you're mind is in that space, I feel that they look like what a game programmer might have designed for an 8-bit Quidditch player sprite back in the 80s were it a thing back then.

12 Quidditch players flying all over the place, plus two seekers... well... that's a problem on the 2600... at least for a novice programmer like myself... so where to start?

Back to my childhood for inspiration... playing table top - rod hockey in the attack of my grandfather's attic with my brother.

So table top Quidditch... they have that right? I would imagine that wizards would have that for kids. The sliding action certainly would make the game easier to program.

If you want to check it out at 8bitworkshop.com, here's a link:
http://8bitworkshop.com/v2.1.0/?file=shared%2Fquantum.asm&platform=vcs

Also, I've attached the binary, if you just want to try it on your Harmony cart.