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Balloon Trip (Atari 2600)


bluswimmer

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Yeah the gameplay was really good and addicting. Though I preferred the poodle graphic, the amoeba one is equally good. I will be looking forward to it, not trying to crap on the op's thread or nothing. I did buy Balloon Trip... :D

No offense taken! Dionoid's Amoeba Jump is a great homebrew, people SHOULD be looking forward to a cartridge release of it.

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Yeah the gameplay was really good and addicting. Though I preferred the poodle graphic, the amoeba one is equally good. I will be looking forward to it, not trying to crap on the op's thread or nothing. I did buy Balloon Trip... :D

Yeah I second that! Love the poodle!!! Need to leave him in the game....someway ;-)

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Thats what I was thinking........... don't know if Dionoid will do it.

Even if it's a 4k game, this would be easy to implement. For ROMs, offer two downloads. For cart, include both copies of the game for an 8k ROM, one with Poodle and one with Amoeba graphics. The code checks the position of the difficulty switch upon boot (or even in game) and swaps banks accordingly. Extra rom space is virtually free in 2018.
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  • 1 month later...

Loved watching the video, thanks for posting it bluswimmer!

 

It's rare to see Atari 2600 developers posting commentary videos of themselves playing their own games and it was also great to hear you go into your history of programming VCS games. It was interesting to hear the development process of the game and things you still want to change even after the cartridge had already been released. :-)

 

 

For some reason I tried to do a video where I play the game and talk about some of my experiences developing it. I kinda ramble on a lot during the video, so watch it at your own risk here.

Edited by cimmerian
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For some reason I tried to do a video where I play the game and talk about some of my experiences developing it. I kinda ramble on a lot during the video, so watch it at your own risk here.

 

Always nice to hear the programmer giving some background information on how a game came to be!

 

In the video you talked about creating this game during a boring summer job, so I assume you're a young developer.

Great to see young people showing interested in an old console like the Atari 2600!

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For some reason I tried to do a video where I play the game and talk about some of my experiences developing it. I kinda ramble on a lot during the video, so watch it at your own risk here.

 

It really is a great game. Please don't berate yourself because you built the title screen entirely out of playfield blocks, or came up with clever little shortcuts. It's brilliant. All Atari games bitd took liberties and shortcuts to do tricks onscreen for stuff that wasn't previously possible. Those tricks get copied and adopted by other programmers. Games like this showcase the sheer variety that is possible with 4k titles. It could have easily existed bitd, but Nintendo would have sued. LOL. I think this game is well enough below their radar, still mourning the takedown Princess Rescue. :sad:

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It really is a great game. Please don't berate yourself because you built the title screen entirely out of playfield blocks, or came up with clever little shortcuts. It's brilliant. All Atari games bitd took liberties and shortcuts to do tricks onscreen for stuff that wasn't previously possible. Those tricks get copied and adopted by other programmers. Games like this showcase the sheer variety that is possible with 4k titles. It could have easily existed bitd, but Nintendo would have sued. LOL. I think this game is well enough below their radar, still mourning the takedown Princess Rescue. :sad:

Thanks for the kind words. Make no mistake, I'm still really proud of the game and the fact that so many people enjoy it. I'm just pointing out a couple of things that I want to work on/address for my next game, even if they aren't necessarily issues in the eyes of most people.

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  • 10 months later...

Good game, really makes fun. Does this exist as a PAL or PAL60 version too? Even in the AtariAge Shop it seems that it's only available in NTSC version. I also tried different keys on the Atari, if maybe the colors can be switched, but seems not to work.

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12 hours ago, AW127 said:

Good game, really makes fun. Does this exist as a PAL or PAL60 version too? Even in the AtariAge Shop it seems that it's only available in NTSC version. I also tried different keys on the Atari, if maybe the colors can be switched, but seems not to work.

I didn't make a PAL version of Balloon Trip. Unfortunately this game was made before I had the sense to use constants for my color values. I'm currently pretty busy with school right now, but I'll see if I can make a PAL version soon. Frankly, it's long overdue...

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Just now, bluswimmer said:

I didn't make a PAL version of Balloon Trip. Unfortunately this game was made before I had the sense to use constants for my color values. I'm currently pretty busy with school right now, but I'll see if I can make a PAL version soon. Frankly, it's long overdue...

That would be great!  :)

 

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It's funny, when you fly fast horizontally over the water and the fish tries to catch you, cause when you fast enough, he is to late sometimes and you see him jumping out the water behind you. *lol* I tried to fool him a little bit in this way, some minutes ago, but then he caught me from underneath, because i must slow-down a little bit, dodging one of the sparks, hahaha. Think the fish was pretty angry about me at that point. ?

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  • 2 years later...

Apologies to @bluswimmer for hacking his game, and the necro-bump of this thread...  Anyways, I kinda like this game, and in order to try to hone my '2600 skillz' I've disassembled and hacked up this game, and hopefully improved it in some way.

 

Although I did this for myself as a learning experience, I thought the result was good enough to post.  Lots of changes, but it's still the same game.  It now has more colors and stuff.  I'll let others be the judge...

-----

UPDATE!!! I'm still working on this, now it's 'Balloon Trip Plus'.   I've added a  good bit more stuff, flying piranha fish, graphics updates, a very special bonus round, new animations, and etc...  And I've optimized the code to be smaller, and there is still about 1.5K of ROM left.

 

It's still WIP as I figure out what more to do... It's got a lot of ROM space to add more features.  Check out this new version, it's kinda cool:

 

balloontrip+ [glurk].bin

Edited by glurk
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On 10/15/2022 at 4:10 AM, glurk said:

Apologies to @bluswimmer for hacking his game, and the necro-bump of this thread...  Anyways, I kinda like this game, and in order to try to hone my '2600 skillz' I've disassembled and hacked up this game, and hopefully improved it in some way.

 

-- snipped for space reasons --

Don't apologize, I welcome romhacks like this! Honestly, I'm kinda flattered.... I haven't played much of it yet, but I definitely appreciate some of the updated graphics, especially the death animation.

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