Potato Chips En Masse!

[+atari2600land]

"Hardly anyone knows that the potato chips and the onion rings have been in a war for junk food supremacy since the beginning of time. The gods must be crazy since they've now given them both the ability to fire off missiles at each other, and it has taken their rivalry to a new level. Who will be the ultimate junk food?"

 

So I've decided to make a game out of the Hamburgers attempt for the Atari 2600, but I needed to make the burger be one color since the missile would change colors. That and I decided to make the game easier for me to program. So I changed the burger into a potato chip.

 

Known bug:

The life counter displays a square for one frame at game over. I need to fix this.

 

Tested with Harmony on my 7800 and it works fine. Work will also continue on new level making. I have about 1,900 bytes left so we'll see what other levels I can make. There's two in there already. And if anyone can make a potato chip sprite that doesn't look like a deranged Pac-Man, please do so and post it for me.

potatochips24.bin

[Fort Apocalypse]

This is great! I got into the caves a bit, and want to find out if there is a large leader of the onion rings somewhere that my potato chip must fight to the death!

 

¡¡Viva la revolución de las papas fritas!!

[+atari2600land]

Thanks! No leader onion ring yet, but that gives me a good idea: a final boss fight at the end. I was wondering how I would do such a thing, but now I think I have an idea about how to do it.

Changes:

• fixed the square in the score at game over.
• added a game over tune.
• fixed the onion ring bug where it snuck into the beginning of the level after coming up when the level was beaten.

I now have about 1,800 bytes left.

potatochips25.bin

[+atari2600land]

New version up on the new website. This will be the home of the updates I make.

I spent the last couple of hours on a new level and then that broke the other two levels so I had to fix those. I think it's okay now.

The potato chip takes a dip in ranch dressing the ocean.

[+atari2600land]

I thought to myself what would make the game more interesting. Then I had an idea: homing missiles. These will start after level 3. But the missiles were different widths. So I had to fix that. I ended up having to redo the levels. I worked for about 6 hours trying to do this. All while my eye hurts.

I also had to change the shape of the potato chip and the onion ring to make them smaller. I didn't add a level 4, so the level will go back to the cave over and over again once you defeat the ocean.

[Fort Apocalypse]

I like the homing missiles!

[+atari2600land]

I added in a boss stage. I had an idea in mind, but it wouldn't let me do it. So I had to think of something that it would actually let me do. I decided to have a giant onion ring in the middle. Originally I wanted to shoot the giant onion ring but that's the thing it wouldn't allow me to do. So instead, I made it so if you touch the giant onion ring you die. Also, you have to shoot at enemies. It's harder than it sounds. I tried it on real hardware (a 7800). It took me at least a dozen tries just to get to level 3.

Right now I have it set up so that if you hit two onion rings it goes to the boss screen. This is so that I could get to it fairly quickly without dying. When it's done, it will be shooting 40 onion rings on the main screen, and 10 here on the boss screen.

I have decided that the game will loop until you lose all your lives since it's really hard as it is. Up next will be programming level 4 in, but first I have to think about what background level 4 should have.

My eye wants to hurt again, I also can make it hurt sometimes if I get real angry, which I was during programming and playtesting. But at least the screen doesn't jump erratically on a real 7800.

[+atari2600land]

Here's a special version showcasing what I was thinking about level progression.

• shoot 40 onion rings in the main level for 1 point each
• shoot 12 more onion rings at the boss screen that are 5 points each

That's a total of 100 points per level. Right now there's only three levels, but I hope to add at least 3 more. It seems as though each level uses around 200 bytes and I have around 1,400 more bytes left in 4k.

potatochips31.bin

[Fort Apocalypse]

On 8/26/2022 at 10:49 AM, atari2600land said:

Here's a special version showcasing what I was thinking about level progression.

• shoot 40 onion rings in the main level for 1 point each
• shoot 12 more onion rings at the boss screen that are 5 points each

That's a total of 100 points per level. Right now there's only three levels, but I hope to add at least 3 more. It seems as though each level uses around 200 bytes and I have around 1,400 more bytes left in 4k.

potatochips31.bin 4 kB · 2 downloads

The 2nd level (boss) with the potato chip outline is much more difficult than the old 2nd and 3rd levels! Would it be better as the last level (6th)?

[+atari2600land]

OK, I'll put it as the last level. The potato chip outline is actually the boss onion ring.

Right now I'm trying to add in a title screen but I'm having a little bit of difficulty.

As you can see, the second half of the title (player 1) is not lined up with the first half (player 0). Both sprites are 59 pixels tall, but notice how the capital N in "EN" is half a pixel lower(!) And thus throws the a and second s in "masse" off. And I don't know why. I'm including my code so in case you want to attempt to see why it's doing this (and perhaps fix it, that'd be good).

 

potatochips32a.asm

[+atari2600land]

OK. I fixed it. Don't ask me what the problem was. The solution was to add a "sleep 13" statement in the code after it generates the sprites' colors.

I also added the death to touching the final level's onion ring. I'll have to move this periodically once more levels have been put in.

I also made shooting an onion ring worth 4 points so you need to shoot 25 of them for 100 points and to move on to the next level.

I have 1,282 bytes left.

[+atari2600land]

Figured out how to put a visual life counter in. Since there is never more than three lives, I figured I should do that instead of displaying a number. I will change the color of it later. I just made it yellow to test it. That also meant redoing the score, which was a pain until I realized I could just sort of copy the code from Nosehair into it. So that's what I did. I have 1,203 bytes left.

In the picture above, the potato chip has three lives remaining.

[Fort Apocalypse]

Running in Stella developer mode, it looks like maybe fewer cycles need to be used / code needs to be reduced, because it's a little shaky. Potato chips and onion rings may need to go on a diet, but it plays well!

 

I got to the boss and lost both times I tried. Could homing missiles start after the boss level?

 

 

Edited August 29, 2022 by Fort Apocalypse

[+atari2600land]

How's this?

The number only goes red when reset gets held or you die. I can't seem to make it do any better. When you die, the scanline counter jumps to 268 for only one frame and I don't know why. I'm putting my code here in case someone wants to help me.

 

potatochips34.asm potatochips34.bin

[+atari2600land]

Six hours later and I think I finally did it. Let me know if I didn't.

@Fort Apocalypse Thanks for letting me know about developer mode.

potatochips34d.bin

[Fort Apocalypse]

1 hour ago, atari2600land said:

Six hours later and I think I finally did it. Let me know if I didn't.

@Fort Apocalypse Thanks for letting me know about developer mode.

potatochips34d.bin 4 kB · 1 download

You got rid of the jitter! Looks good! I almost made it past the boss level this time.

[+atari2600land]

Spent a few hours just now trying to design a fourth level. I had to make some different things in order to make it fit in 262 scanlines, so my attempt at forest has to look kind of weird.

The left side of the screen kept glitching out. I kept trying to not make it do that, but it just wouldn't stop. In the end, I had to make the playfield tree trunk color the same as the playfield data (presumably to save on cycles). Fortunately I was able to find a COLUPF and PFx that didn't look too weird. And then I redesigned the tree tops and tried to make it so they looked like two trees close together.

[+atari2600land]

I have stopped all work on all my games for a few days because the power company may shut off my power for no good reason (see my blog for more info.) Work may resume Sunday.

[+atari2600land]

Changed a few things.

• Potato chip now must shoot 40 onion rings to get to the boss. The potato chip will fly up to the boss.
• When the potato chip shoots 10 onion rings in the boss level, the boss will disappear and the chip will fly to the next level.

I wondered how I'd make the boss disappearing, then it hit me: Make the playfield color the same as the background. The homing missiles should start on level 4. With all this done, all that's left to do is design more levels and make sure the scanline count remains steady at 262.

potatochips36.bin

[+atari2600land]

Finally got the trees in the forest looking good. I had to mess around with various size sleep statements and placement of the tree top/trunk color change and PFx adjustments.

I found that if you press F12 in the Stella debugger it gives you a smaller picture than pressing F12 while playing the game. I don't know if that's intentional or not, but I like the debugger's picture size more than the other. The other is massively huge.

 

potatochips36b.bin

[+atari2600land]

I was bored and had insomnia, so I changed the title screen. But I don't know if I should change it permanently to this, or keep what was in version 36b. What do you think?

potatochips37.bin

[chavert]

.

Edited September 8, 2023 by chavert

[+atari2600land]

How about if I put the color changes in version 36b into the title screen of 37? I need some help, though if I were to do this. How would I add what the value of x is to a variable?

[+atari2600land]

How's this? I sort of did what I wanted to do: make the title screen background be white and have the words change color like 36b, only the colors are all screwed up because I can't make it do exactly like it was, but it seems like a good effect (like the "random" colors in the title screen of "Killer Bees" for the Odyssey².)

potatochips37a.bin

[+atari2600land]

Help me add.

 

What I want to do is add the value of x to a variable called "Tttt" (which is stored in a) and save it as the new COLUPF. How would I do this?