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Battle for Proton (2600)


azure

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This is something I've been working on over the past couple weeks. It's very basic and very WIP, so there's no real game play yet. It's only a demo. I'm not that sure where I'm going with this one, but I have some ideas. It started with an experiment, but I scrapped everything I wrote and started over. I have only two goals with this game. Fast and greasy.

 

The concept so far: The new human settlements on the recently discovered exoplanet are under attack. You're the best pilot in the colony, so it's up to you to defend the colony from the alien attackers. You're piloting the state of the art ship equipped with the best laser cannon in the fleet.

 

I've uploaded the code to Github.

 

I'm open to suggestions.

 

 

 

title.png

game.png

proton-02.bin

proton-01.bin

Edited by azure
Upload version 0.2
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Really great use of the playfield, super fast scrolling and everything is colourful and detailed! The kernel looks like it has all the basic elements solid and ready to go for a great game. I'm really looking forward to see where you take this.

 

A couple ideas:

- The buildings can show more destruction or are on fire as the enemies attack them

- Powerups to collect (wider laser, extra life, etc)

- Ability to rebuild the destroyed buildings by hovering over them and pressing the button. This also temporarily leaves you vulnerable as you are not able to shoot the enemies. The more the building is destroyed/on fire, the longer it takes to repair the building.

- A counter with how many buildings there are left in your colony at the end of each wave. Kind of like Paperboy / Missile Command where you can gain or lose buildings depending on how well you do.

 

Bugs / Intentional?:

- There are pixels in the playfield on the right hand side that shimmer as it scrolls.

- Depending on how fast you fly, the buildings and/or enemies may or may not appear

- The buildings pop on and off the screen instead of being partially drawn as they scroll. I don't expect you'll be drawing the enemies on the same line as your ship as they're the same graphic but they could be drawn at the top scrolling on/off.

 

Just an aside, I think it's funny how the enemies appear to spawn out of the buildings if you go backwards. ?

 

- James

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12 hours ago, ZeroPage Homebrew said:

A couple ideas:

- The buildings can show more destruction or are on fire as the enemies attack them

- Powerups to collect (wider laser, extra life, etc)

- Ability to rebuild the destroyed buildings by hovering over them and pressing the button. This also temporarily leaves you vulnerable as you are not able to shoot the enemies. The more the building is destroyed/on fire, the longer it takes to repair the building.

- A counter with how many buildings there are left in your colony at the end of each wave. Kind of like Paperboy / Missile Command where you can gain or lose buildings depending on how well you do.

 

Bugs / Intentional?:

- There are pixels in the playfield on the right hand side that shimmer as it scrolls.

- Depending on how fast you fly, the buildings and/or enemies may or may not appear

- The buildings pop on and off the screen instead of being partially drawn as they scroll. I don't expect you'll be drawing the enemies on the same line as your ship as they're the same graphic but they could be drawn at the top scrolling on/off.

 

I like the idea of healing/repairing the destroyed buildings. I'm adding more stuff to the HUD. A rudimentary radar, fuel, damage, and alarm gauges. There's no problem with showing stats on an intermission wave screen. 

 

This is a very early WIP, so there is no real alien or building logic. It's just stub code to test the kernel rendering. I'm working on an RNG for generating aliens and buildings procedurally. I will be rendering aliens and buildings in the top and bottom rows. I haven't got around to it yet.

 

If you mean the green playfield shimmering, that's unavoidable at the moment, because it's doing work on a horizontal positioning line. Horizontal positioning while rendering playfield complicates matters. It's essentially violating horizontal separation. There are only 5 excess cycles available for extra work in the horizontal blank during horizontal positioning, so I may need to go with another special case positioning routine. The strange thing I discovered during testing is 1 blank line hidden among the backgound texture isn't noticeable, so I can fall back to that. If not, I'll chop some pixels off to avoid it entirely (like Activision games.) I like the wide screen format though. Wide screen is worth the effort, imo.

 

Features I am considering at the moment:

 

  • Ice, desert, mountain landscapes.
  • Defend and chase modes. Defend mode is when the aliens attack buildings. Chase mode is when you go after flying aliens.
  • Combat divided into waves.
  • Reduced terrain detail at higher speeds. Too much detail at speed becomes a blur.

 

I have a few more features in mind but I'm holding off mentioning them, because I'm not sure they're technically possible. I have to tighten up the kernel to free some cycles.

 

Edited by azure
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I've uploaded version 0.2. I have the top and bottom rows rendering buildings, so they don't pop in and out of existence. The top row also renders enemy fighters. Enemy fighters don't currently cross into the bottom row. This was kind of tricky, so I went through a few kernel versions before getting it to work. I also reduced RAM usage, because I had a few unnecessary arrays. 

 

I also added the full title name to the title screen. Enemies and buildings spawning is still stubbed. I'll be working on that next.

 

 

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