AverageSoftware's Development Blog - RealSports Curling

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After completing my first 5200 project, Ratcatcher, I've jumped right into another project.

I grew up in the Buffalo, NY area and spent a lot of time watching Canadian television. Therefore, I grew up very familiar with the grand sport of curling. My wife and I played for a few years in a local curling club here in Seattle, so while I'm no pro, I do know quite a lot about the game.

Over my many years as a hobbyist game programmer I've noticed that sports games seem to be quite rare outside of major studios. I've wanted to do a sports game for quite some time, but I wanted to do something a little off the beaten path.

My first consideration was actually cricket. I went through a period of obsession with the game, and I still love watching it. Cricket games are basically unheard of in the United States, and an Atari 5200 cricket game would be a lot of fun to play. Unfortunately, I've never played cricket, I've only watched and read about it, so I didn't trust myself to do it right.

Curling was option number two. I've curled before, I know how it works, I know the rules quite well. This is a sport I can do.

But how to design it? Curling offers a few technical challenges on the 5200. First off, there could be as many as 16 rocks in play, plus all the rings, lines, and other markings. How in the world do I display all this stuff?

I believe I can do all of the rocks as playfield objects and create the rings and markings with players and missiles. I've got a rough plan for this, but I still need to workout the details. Before that, I need a screen layout.

My inspiration for the layout was Intellivision Bowling. A score is display in the middle, a "status display" of sorts on the top, and the delivery is on the bottom. I think this can work pretty well.

So far, I've got the basic screen mocked up, but haven't placed any objects. Right now, it looks like this:




You can see the nice score sheet in the middle, and the two ice displays. The next thing to get in place are the rings.

I have a public Subversion repository at svn://averagesoftware-uniserver.no-ip.org/svn/rs_curling

The source can be assembled with DASM, and anyone should feel free to follow the project.

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/656/entry-13237-realsports-curling/