New Game - Bag Boy!

[KevKelley]

I had recently started programming a game for the Atari 2600 since I had just discovered batari Basic and the visual editor. I used to mess around with BASIC years ago but I was never that experienced and am a bit rusty but love tearing apart code and trying to find logical solutions.

 

The game that I am making is one that I have been trying to make for years but my programming was never at that good. The game is titled Bag Boy! The basic idea behind the game is that you play as Bag Boy, the employee of a grocery store whose main goal is to collect shopping carts from the parking lot before they strike cars that are passing by. I was going for the classic arcade style of gameplay, with progressively faster gameplay and difficulty.

 

To start I am using a standard kernel and have a sprite for the shopping cart and Bag Boy and use a 8x8 missile as the car. I may scrap this and work out something new should my programming progress. Right now this is what I was starting with. My ideas for game play that I want to implement are the following:

 

• Have the shopping carts slowly accelerate to impact the car.
• Possibly have multiple carts or cars.
• Have additional or alternating sprites that may randomly appear instead of a cart respawn, such as a "dog" that chases the player.
• Have different playfields generate or change how they operate, like an "iced" parking lot that causes a little bit of sliding.
• Powerups, such as an "energy drink" that temporarily speeds up the player or "tips" that boost score.
• Have a health bar for the car. Each collision with a cart decreases both score and health. if bar reaches zero then game over. Also collision between player and car results in loss of life (which would also require in life counters).
• Have potential bonus levels at certain increments, like make the door accessible for a period of time that moves player to a new playfield temporarily.
• Add titlescreen and game over screen with music
• Sprite animations and additional sound effects.
• And... according to my wife, make the car look like a car and not a square.

 

This may not be the entire list but these are things that I am slowly working on. Right now the program is very basic and I am sure the code is sloppy and inefficient. I know some people have issues with the batari basic appearance. I personally think it works for what I want to try. I greatly appreciate this forum and all the great work everybody has done on here. I have been reading for years and have finally worked up the courage to program myself.

 

I hope you all enjoy. I look forward to any feedback. This project is something I would really like to finish and produce in cartridge form.

 

Thanks,

 

Kevin

 

 

default.bas

[CrazyChris]

.bin?

[KevKelley]

Sorry about that. I'll get into the habit of posting both.

default.bas.bin

[KevKelley]

I'm trying not to be too ambitious with this project. I know I have only really started and I plan on keep building on this. I have been trying to work on this while my baby naps and my other son is at school, which gives me a small window of uninterrupted silence...

[Arenafoot]

looks interesting - as I'm a manager at a grocery store for my real job

[KevKelley]

I am also a grocery manager. I had originally thought of this back in around 2000 when I first started at Albertsons but I couldn't quite figure out how to program it. I kind of simplified the gameplay for programming. I had originally envisioned a larger parking lot with several cars and carts, with each car acting as a gravity well.

 

Even with the game simplified, I found the gameplay to be somewhat enjoyable. The current speed is what I would imagine a higher difficulty would be like. I have been messing around with the code to have the cart spawn farther away from the car but haven't made much progress on its acceleration or any other feature.

 

Once I get the basics down I will probably write a newer program with cleaner code. Typically on my lunches I read the forums here and jot down notes in a book so when I get home and my baby is napping I can experiment. It has been trial and error.

[KevKelley]

I'm hoping to work a little bit on the game this weekend. My next big thing I want to work on is the cart movement and practice with fixed math.

[KevKelley]

I was still trying to figure out how I need to use some variables and stuff but in the meantime I had added a life counter, a status bar, and a game over screen.

 

The life counter is impacted by player/car collisions.

The status bar is impacted by cart/car collisions.

 

The depletion of either one results in a game over.

 

I tried to use the game over screen as an exercise to learn how to make flashing colors and play some sound along with it, as well as change playfields.

 

And I think I may have screwed up the cart movement a little bit when I was trying to fix its spawning so that it would not appear too close to the car. Now it occasionally stops or speeds up if moving in the same direction as the player. Not a big deal since I was planning on fixing that anyway...

BagBoy.bas.bin

BagBoy.bas

[KevKelley]

I got an opportunity to mess with the game today. I realized how I screwed up the movement of the cart by accidentally putting player0 in some code I had made for player1.

 

I worked a little on cart movement so it starts of a little slower and then gradually gains on the car. It isn't perfect but it is a start. I also changed player movement too so that Bag Boy moves just slightly faster than the cart. I added a variable so that I can alter the movement with things like difficulty settings, power ups, or level changes.

 

For some reason, when I changed the code collision detection between Bag Boy and the walls and cars stopped working.

 

I haven't uploaded the code because my battery died on my laptop... But I will with the latest update as soon as I sit back down on a computer.

[KevKelley]

Here is the latest that I had been working on. Tweaked it a bit and got some things working, like the collision with the walls but not the car. I know there is still a lot of work to be done but I'm hoping to get the basic gameplay down to where I can then start to add things or clean it up a bit.

BagBoy_924.bas

[KevKelley]

I had moved this thread over to the batari Basic programming forum until this gets closer to being done.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/283699-wip-bag-boy-atari-2600/