Doodling on the Odyssey²

[Chris+++]

 

Heh! Why not indeed! Looking forward to loading it up and seeing what you did there.

 

[+pboland]

9 hours ago, atari2600land said:

Yars' Revenge for the Intellivision? How about Yars' Revenge for the Odyssey²? I got super bored.

yar1.bin 2 kB · 3 downloads

Wow! You are an O2 programing machine! I hope your games do get published. I'll have to check these out in the emulator.

[+atari2600land]

The Yars' Revenge idea came last night when I was struggling to go to sleep. I kept thinking about how I would set the screen up. I added the shield. It consists of 8 characters. The hardest part will be figuring out which part of the shield the energy missile hits (I'm using terminology from the instruction manual.) The qotile will sit behind the shield. I added something new though. if the yar touches the shield, it renders the yar immovable. I figure this way would be the easiest to tackle the yar/shield collision. The shield moves up and down. It can move at different speeds. The lowest speed is 255 (barely moving at all), and the highest speed is 1. So I put it at a still extremely low 16 to start with.

 

I have used up 641 bytes so far. I think I'll have enough room to make this a 2k game. But I do have a problem.

 

I was working on a game called The Golden Q Quest. I want to finish both games. But which one should I work on first? Working on both at the same time would be extremely hard for me, so I need to focus on just one at a time. Not only that, I'm having deja vu again for no sensible reason.

yar2.bin

[+atari2600land]

As it turned out I barely had enough room to put a third ghost in levels 3 and 4. Now three ghosts are in level 3 and I have 8 bytes left to spare in that bank (0) and what will eventually be bank 2.

[+atari2600land]

More doodling.

The U changes colors randomly, sort of like the "screensaver" on early Atari 2600 games.

If I can get started programming past the title screen:

 

This will be like my Fruit Fly Fun for the Atari 2600 only with mazes to go through. You need to collect the umbrellas as they pop up on the screen, the faster you get the umbrella the more points you score, but also you need to traverse through the maze and avoid the enemy underwear. Once you've reached 25 umbrellas gotten, the maze changes and the enemies go faster.

 

Ulysses (the 'umpire' in the title) will be consist of two sprites. So will the umbrellas. The enemy ghosts will be made up of characters. More and more ghosts will start appearing as you get in the game until a total of 6 are floating around (on maze #6). Or I could go another route and make the characters be the walking men and call them "unsightly underwear users" and have 12 different ones walking around (on maze #12).

 

I have about 1,300 bytes left, so plenty of room to do some more stuff in this bank. Or I could put the entire game in another bank and have a 4k game. Thoughts?

uglyuppityumpire1.bin

[Chris+++]

 

Just my amateurish feedback here, since you asked: Perhaps it would be best to implement everything you want in the current space and really fine-tune the mechanics, and see if you find the game fun without complicating things too much. If you still think, "Nah, it needs something more," then those 1,300 surplus bytes, or possibly even the extra 2k, will beckon!

 

Just going off general experience here, although coding for the C64 is certainly a different world from the O2. But the latter specializes in games that "feel good to play" because they're straightforward and don't have a lot of unnecessary complexity; they can be quite visceral, even when strategy is involved (i.e. Killer Bees and the speed and fluidity of the K.C. games).

 

(I dig the title! )

 

 

 

Edited June 20, 2023 by Chris+++

[Dantaipan]

On 5/13/2022 at 3:30 AM, atari2600land said:

Fixed another bug with the game.

1_on_1_basketball_2022_05_13.bin 4 kB · 34 downloads

Thanks. This game is also very useful as a joystick tester. Confirmed that my right hardwired stick is crap. 🤪

[+atari2600land]

I decided the best thing to do would be to put the in-game in one bank and the title screen in another. This way it would be a lot harder to fill the in-game bank's allowed data amount (2k.) Today I worked on getting the man in there moving. Not making him get stuck in the wall was hard. As it turns out, his bottom pixels all need to be the same when he's animated walking. This presented a challenge when trying to animate the man walking around.

I think the in-game data would be bigger than the 1,300 bytes I had left. So that's why I decided to just move it all into another bank. Up next: Putting an umbrella in the game for Ulysses (the ugly uppity umpire) to get.

uuu3.bin

[+atari2600land]

A little (mute due to "copyright claims") video I made of version 4.

 

[+atari2600land]

Hi. I'm back doodling on the Odyssey 2. Right now I'm working on 1 on 1 Soccer. Not very much here, yet it's about half of 2k. Hopefully I can fit what I'm planning within one bank.