melbourne tatty for the 2600 -- a maze adventure

[CPFace]

mt6.bin

 

Story

 

So you've decided to seek your fortune as an adventurer, scouring the mazes of melbourne tatty for elusive and valuable treasures. Just be careful, as this is no average maze -- the walls shift and move with a life of their own to confuse and disorient you. And beware of the hungry wolf that prowls the maze, looking for a tasty morsel like you...

 

Game Select

 

 

The opening screen will display your most recent score until you press Select. Keep pressing select to choose the level you wish to start from. (The default is Level 1.) Press Fire on the left joystick or Reset to begin.

 

Navigating the Maze

 

 

Use the left joystick to move around the screen. Walls will block you, but they won't block the wolf! Try to gather the golden treasures as they appear on the screen. You get ten points for every treasure you collect. If you can recover ten treasures, you'll move on to the next level.

 

Press the fire button to put down a golden decoy. The wolf will leave you alone and pursue the decoy until he grabs it. Use this time to put some distance between you! You get three decoys at the start of every level. Every time you place a decoy, your decoy meter on the left side of the screen will drop. You get fifty bonus points for every unused decoy at the end of the level.

 

Hazards

 

 

The wolf pursues you relentlessly across the screen. He'll move one room at a time through the maze, pausing briefly in every room he reaches. You'll hear a warning tone shortly before he moves. If he catches you, you'll lose one life. You get three lives before the game is over.

 

 

Watch out for moving walls! If you get caught in the wall, you'll be stuck until it moves out of the way again. You'll be a sitting duck for the wolf to catch!

 

Strategy

 

Conserve your decoys. You can get up to 150 bonus points at the end of each level for them. But learn the best place to put them so you can get through an emergency alive.

 

Learn to manipulate the wolf. Don't just go rushing into the maze -- plan your route carefully and trick the wolf into pursuing you away from the next treasure.

 

Every level is different. Learn how the walls move in each level and get a feel for where your best opportunities for retreat lie. Get your timing down so that you can skip from room to room without getting stuck in the walls.

 

If all else fails, you can sometimes find a safe spot in the same room as the wolf by tucking into one of the lower corners. This won't work in the cells at the bottom of the screen though!

 

Aaaaaaand that's my first Atari 2600 homebrew game. Made with batari's 2600 Basic, of course. Enjoy.

Edited August 29, 2006 by CPFace

[Zach]

Congrats on your first atari 2600 game. The changing maze reminds me of Alligator People.

 

I think one thing that would make the game less frustrating and more fun is if you don't allow the player to get stuck in a maze wall. You can program it so that the player gets pushed away from the wall when one appears.

[supercat]

I think one thing that would make the game less frustrating and more fun is if you don't allow the player to get stuck in a maze wall. You can program it so that the player gets pushed away from the wall when one appears.

 

Having to avoid the walls is part of the game, but I'd like to see the walls "flicker" for a little while before they switch. Maybe show the new walls once every 4 frames for 1/4 second, then 3 out of every 4 frames for 1/4 second when they switch.

[SeaGtGruff]

Aaaaaaand that's my first Atari 2600 homebrew game.

What about Jym and Pong Kombat?

 

MR

[CPFace]

I consider Jym more of a warmup exercise, just something to see if I could move sprites and dots around on the screen. Pong Kombat, I'm not sure how much attention I want to draw to it. I got permission from Stephen Gagne to adapt his idea, but obviously not from Atari or Midway.

 

So melbourne tatty is more like... my first game using an original concept that I consider robust enough to consider publishing?

 

As for changing wall behavior or unsticking the player, I think I'm most likely to go with unsticking the player, but I would implement that as a difficulty option. Learning to anticipate the behavior of the walls really is meant to be part of the game's challenge.

[+thegoldenband]

I think I had a dream with this game in it! Which is probably a good sign -- it's a fun little number with a pleasantly creepy edge to it. Could use a few more bells and whistles, perhaps, to make the gameplay a little more complex.