Time Wizard - a game for ABBUC Software Contest 2023

[amarok]

It is my great pleasure to introduce you my entry for ABBUC Software Contest 2023.

Time Wizard is a platformer game where the player can manipulate time.

 

 

In-game story:
Robots from the future are trying to change history to rule the world.
The only salvation for humanity is you, the Time Wizard.
You must go to the future to the world of robots to prevent the disaster.
Your task is to collect all the energy stored in hourglasses so that robots cannot back in time.
The mission is difficult but your advantage is the ability to manipulate time.
You can stop it, rewind or restore the history.
But be careful! Some objects are resistant to time manipulation and you cannot control them.

 

During the game, press the fire button on your joystick to start the manipulation.
With the button pressed, move left to rewind history or move right to restore the saved history.
You can change the speed of the time shift by moving your joystick left or right.
Release the button to restore the normal passage of time.
If you die, press the fire button and move left to rewind.
Press Start key to restart the level.
Press Select key to go to the main menu.

 

Additional description:
In the main screen, it is possible to select one of the 15 levels.
At the beginning all levels except the first one are locked.
You must successfully pass the level to unlock the next one.
To do it you must collect all hourglasses and go to the time portal.
You have limited time to pass the level but remember that you can rewind time if you need.
The time you don't use is your score for the level. The greater the value the better result.
Sum from all levels is your total time visible on the main screen.

 

Minimal requirements:
Atari 8-bit computer or emulator with at least 128kB RAM.
The additional RAM is required to store and restore the history of gameplay.
Joystick or other manipulator in port 1 to control the game.
Unprotected floppy disk to store the high score and unlocked levels is highly recommended.

[erichenneke]

Looks sweet!!!  Great job. Can't wait to play it!! 🙂🙂🙂

[kconan]

Great work!  Looks like fun

[+eebuckeye]

Looks fun!

[Beeblebrox]

@amarok very very nice concept, engine and graphics. The time element is a very clever aspect, much like the gravity flip is in Flob.

I also love the speed of play. Can't wait to boot this one up when available. Love the colours too. Good luck. 

[+slx]

Looks great. I’d imagine that keeping track of where the player was must add quite some level of overhead to the main game loop. 
 

It would be great if you could publish a bit about the internals and/or „making of“ once the contest is over. 

[Beeblebrox]

...just to add the music speeding up when manipulating time whilst the screen colours switch to grey is a very nice touch.  It's little details like this, aside the gameplay elements and pushing the graphics, that really elevate the game.

Seriously can't wait to play this.  

 

One thing - is there a plan to add more levels going forward?

[TGB1718]

Very nice, well done.

[Rybags]

Looks good.  The VCR fast forward artifacts a nice touch.

[TheNameOfTheGame]

Great work there!  Looking forward to playing it after the contest! 

[rdefabri]

Awesome!

[Gibstov]

Looks pretty cool.

[+cjherr]

Excellent work! Looking forward to this.

[+Philsan]

My disk drives can't wait to receive ABBUC Magazine!

[amarok]

Thank you very much for your kind words. I am really glad that you like it.

 

12 hours ago, slx said:

It would be great if you could publish a bit about the internals and/or „making of“ once the contest is over. 

Of course, I will explain how it works when I find a while. But in fact, it isn't rocket science.

But for me, it was very challenging project with exploration of completely unknown areas and technologies.

I decided to prepare a game for the contest so that I would be motivated to finish the project on time

 

11 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:

...just to add the music speeding up when manipulating time whilst the screen colours switch to grey is a very nice touch.

The most difficult for me was to prepare a sound engine which gives possibility to play music and sfx with different speeds including reverse direction.

 

10 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:

One thing - is there a plan to add more levels going forward?

I think there might be some new levels in the future if there is interest... who knows?

 

[rdefabri]

I really love the sprite work - looks more modern, particularly with the outline on the main character.

 

Reminds me of the thread on updating Q-Bert.  Can't remember who suggested it, but a comment was made that outlining the characters with a dark color really improved the look, and I agree.

 

The design work on this one is great - can't wait to play it.

[Beeblebrox]

49 minutes ago, amarok said:

12 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:

...just to add the music speeding up when manipulating time whilst the screen colours switch to grey is a very nice touch.

The most difficult for me was to prepare a sound engine which gives possibility to play music and sfx with different speeds including reverse direction.

 

12 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:

One thing - is there a plan to add more levels going forward?

I think there might be some new levels in the future if there is interest... who knows?

Yes, I can well imagine the sound engine must have taken some thought.

 

The possiblity of more levels sounds great.

[Irgendwer]

Looks great!

Inspired by "Braid"?

 

[amarok]

@Irgendwer, you are completely right.

For me, Braid is one of the greatest platformer I ever played.

 

Time Wizard is inspired by Braid in terms of controlling of time. But it is not a conversion at all.

My idea was to create a new game with more arcade elements which would fit to spirit of Atari 8-bit computer.

The game world is also different and contains unique items like force fields, teleports, etc.

[TrekMD]

This looks fun!

[Steril707]

One of the best looking things I have seen on an A8. 

 

Kudos, Sir.

[The V-Man]

Wow.  Nice work on the game, looks and sounds really good.

[amarok]

For those interested, I have some technical information about the Time Wizard game.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the entire Atari community for the wealth of knowledge they willingly share 🙂.
I specifically highlighted some of the people whose tools I used to create my game.

 

Project duration
It took me roughly 5 months to work on the project from the end of February to the end of July.
The git history contains 175 commits, which were made over a period of 93 days.

 

Development environment
The game was implemented in MadPascal, written by Tomasz Biela @tebe.
My development environment is Visual Studio Code with an extension to Pascal, written by Allesandro Fragnani.

The source code takes about 10k lines, including about 2k of assembler code.
In the assembler, I mainly implemented the interrupt handling, the sound engine and the most critical elements that require fast calculations.
The binary (xex file) takes almost 54 kB and the whole thing is located on a 90 kB floppy disk and runs under DOS 2.5.

 

Test environment
For testing and debugging the program, I used the Altirra emulator, written by Avery Lee @phaeron.

I also used my old Atari 130XE computer with SIO2PC as a floppy drive emulator.

 

Title and end graphics
The title and ending screens (visible after passing the entire game) are displayed in Antic E bitmap mode.
To get more than 4 colors I used DLI interrupts and the player/missile graphics.
I originally drew the images in Inkscape, then exported them to bitmaps with the target resolution for the Atari.
I did the final adjustments and corrections to the images in MS Paint.

Finally I used my Python scripts to convert the bitmaps to the resulting files for Atari.
In this way, I was able to generate 2-bit color depth graphics files in the MIC format and the PMG data as well.
Additionally, I got snippets of DLI handler source code responsible for changing the colors and positions of PMG in individual screen lines.

 

Board graphics
All the graphics of the board and status area are in ANTIC 4 character mode.
I prepared a total of 4 fonts - one for the texts and GUI elements (also visible in the main menu), the other for graphic elements on the board.
The remaining 2 fonts contain graphics used for animation of some items on the board.
I prepared the fonts in the Atari Font Maker program, written by Martin Šimeček @matosimi and Peter Hinz @RetroCoder.

 

Hero graphics
The hero is drawn using PMG - the total size of the sprite is 10x18 pixels.
I used overlapping/combining of players to get more colors of the hero.
A total of 36 animation frames have been created to make the hero alive.
To design the graphics, I used the SprEd editor, written by Wojciech Bocianowski @bocianu.

 

Music and sounds
One of the ideas of Time Wizard is the ability to rewind the game time including playing sound effects and music.
I decided to create a simple engine that allows playing music and sounds at different speeds including backwards.
This engine has some limitations and does not give as much playback flexibility as, for example, Raster Music Tracker in terms of effects, filters, etc.
However, in this case, this was not essential - more important was the efficient playback of sound at different speeds.
In the end, 3 channels are used for music playback and the fourth one for sound effects.
I prepared the music and sfx in Raster Music Tracker, written by Radek Sterba and Vin Samuel @VinsCool.

By the way, in the game you can hear the following classical music pieces:
- "Kyrie Eleison" by W.A. Mozart
- "Waltz of the Flowers" by P.I. Tchaikowsky
- "Dance of the Little Swans" by P.I. Tchaikowsky
- "Voices of Spring" by J. Strauss
- "Sonata No. 8 Op. 13" by L. Van Beethoven

 

Compression
The game uses graphic, audio and other data that takes up a lot of space.
That's why I decided to use data compression to fit everything into RAM.
After several attempts, I decided to use the zx5 (de-)compressor, written by Einar Saukas and Krzysztof Dudek @xxl.
Almost 45 kB of data is compressed to less than 16kB, which gives a compression level of approximately 35%.

Levels
I prepared a very primitive level editor in Python and the PySimpleGUI library.
The editor is not very convenient to use, but I didn't have time to implement something more sophisticated.

 

And that's pretty much all the basic technical information.
If you have any questions, feel free to write - I will try to explain as best as possible.

[+MrFish]

Thanks for sharing (I didn't read all details yet, but I'll look closer later).

 

No big surprises in terms of tools.

 

One thing I can say, (depending on requirements) font creation for such graphics can be immensely eased/shortcut with proper use of Graph2Font. I create graphics in Photoshop, import them into Graph2Font, then open the resulting font in FontMaker for final manipulations.

 

[Steril707]

Thanks for the information, mate...