Finished Game: Construction

[Mort]

I want to thank everyone for their help these past few days, you've saved me untold hours of frustration.

 

Here's my first finished game for the Atari 2600. The game is called Construction, and the basic storyline is that you play as two construction workers who are upset with each others, so they're trying to solve their differences by squishing each other underneath huge crates.

 

The controls are standard joystick controls, the fire button drops a box in the last direction you were moving, excluding diagonals. If you drop a box ontop of a pre-existing box, it will slide into the next open playfield slot.

 

To start the game, press reset.

 

I would've added a bit more stuff, but I ran out of room really fast. I might go back later and optimize the code so I can squeeze in a few more things, but I'm one of the students doing this game for the LCC 2700 class at Georgia Tech and I won't have enough time to tinker extensively with it before the project is due. Still, if I had more time I'd put in some additional music, different modes of play (boxes randomly appear, the screen is open and your character just teleports to the opposite side of the screen whenever he hits the edge ala Pac-Man, missles would randomly appear and destroy a line of boxes) and code and AI.

 

Ah yes, and sadly this is a 2-player only game, no AI. I had neither the room nor time to implement it, but this just means you'll have to be more sociable and grab a friend!

 

Code is attatched.

Construction9.bas

Edited April 28, 2006 by Mort

[MausBoy]

dosnt the player already wrap around? thats easy to do though if not.

[Mort]

dosnt the player already wrap around? thats easy to do though if not.

 

They do, it jumps a bit but it's an easy problem to fix. The only reason I didn't do it was I'd have to make another map for that version of the game and a way to select that version (I'd probably use the difficulty button), but I had like...50 bytes of code left. The memory constraints are what got me mostly, that and burn out after doing nothing but programming this game for the past 4 days.

[+SpiceWare]

I'm curious as to what you thought about programming for such primitive hardware. A lot of us remember when it was state-of-the-art

 

Oh - and could you attached the BIN? I'm not set up to compile batari basic.

Edited April 29, 2006 by SpiceWare

[Mort]

I'm curious as to what you thought about programming for such primitive hardware. A lot of us remember when it was state-of-the-art

 

Oh - and could you attached the BIN? I'm not set up to compile batari basic.

 

Sure thing, I'll attatch the bin.

 

Well, I'm fairly new to programming, to be honest, I only started last August. Prior to then, I'd studied fundamentals and tried learning programming a few times before, but was never able to find the right kind of books that approached programming from the standpoint of someone who had no idea where to begin. Other than batari Basic, I've programmed in Python, Java, a little C#, Inform, Voice XML and Chef. Inform was used to make text based adventure games, Voice XML makes automated telephone menu systems, and Chef is an esoteric programming language where the source code ends up looking like a recipe.

 

That said, programming in batari Basic was actually pretty enjoyable. The help file was very um...well...helpful. I just started off looking at some examples, mapped out the program in my head, and then started coding. The hardware was weird, however, even though batar Basic shielded me from the majority of its weirdness. My first idea was to make a port of Bomberman, but I couldn't figure out an easy way to make bomb sprites drop and stay in one spot then explode after a set amount of time, so I had to change my ideas.

 

What I'm trying to get at is I had to be creative in a different way on the Atair. It's like when you're a kid and all you have is a stick and piece of string, and you have to sit there and think, "Well, what the hell can I do with this!?" After a while, you start working with just what you have, tinkering with it, and coming up with really inventive ways of doing things. That's how the Atari programming went. I had no intention of making a game where you dropped boxes onto your opponent, but hey, it could display boxes easily, so it just kinda slid into place. The really challenging part was knowing when to stop! I eventually ran out of ROM space and had to optimize code to squeeze in sound. But hey, it's neat seeing just how much you can cram into a 4k ROM.

 

I love video games, and to be honest, I don't like where video games have been heading recently. Akward plots, lackluster gameplay, and too graphic intensive. Yeah, flashy graphics are nice and all, but they're just eyecandy. I'd rather take solid controls and good gameplay anyday. When I was programming for the Atari, I got to concentrate on that, just making a really polished game that was fun to play without having to worry at all about fancy graphics.

 

Eh, this is becoming a rant, so I'll end it now.

 

Oh, and I'm one of the students in the LCC 2700 class at Georgia Tech, this was our final project in the class. It was due just 2 hours ago, in fact, and people have uploaded the projects. You can check them out here, they're under project 8. We also have done a lot of other weird stuff, so feel free to snoop around some if you want. My name is eorear on the website.

 

http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~bogost/courses/...700/project.php

Construction9.bas.bin

[+SpiceWare]

Thanks! Neat game. I checked out the other projects and was impressed with the other students' work as well. I've been coding a remake of Warlords for the 2600, called Medieval Mayhem. You can check it out in my Blog if your interested.

 

My family got our Atari for Xmas when Space Invaders came out, I believe that would have made it 1980 when I was 14. I was also introduced to the Commodore PET that year in high school. I often stayed after school to learn program in BASIC on my own(I a freshman and the computer class was only for seniors)

 

For Xmas of 81 I received a VIC 20. At the start of 83 I was running a BBS I wrote on the VIC 20. A BBS would be just like the Atari Age forums - a discussion area with private messages, but was computer-to-computer using modems. Unlike Atariage, only 1 person could be online at a time. Very few people could afford multiple modems and phone lines to support concurrent users, and the VIC only supported 1 modem anyway. While it did exist, the internet was unknown to most people back then. The later versions of my BBS software ran on the Commodore 64 and 128 and supported animated character sets, sprite graphics, real-time-music and joystick control all at the super fast speed of 300 baud(about 30 characters per second). There's a group that's working to make my software run over the internet using VICE, a Commodore emulator. Sadly the OS X version of VICE isn't up to date and doesn't support the "serial over the internet" routines so I've not been too involved other than trying to answer questions about code I wrote 20 years ago.

[gambler172]

Hi

a really nice game.

greetings Gambler172

[Mort]

@Gambler: Why thank you very much!

 

@SpiceWare: I actually had a Commadore 64 when I was much younger. It was eventually given away, much to my dismay, but I remember playing Maniac Mansion and Lock 'N Chase on it extensively. My family also had an Intellivision, but I can't remember which games we had; I'll bet one of my elder siblings would know.

 

I skipped the MUD phase, I've played video games all my life but didn't really get into computers and that side of gaming until around 1995 or so. I had played a few games on DOS and Win 3.1 when I was really young, but didn't really think much of it. Consoles, like the SNES, were much easier for me to use, so I tended to gravitate towards those. Online gaming for me was pretty limited too for a while. I came into the online gaming world when broadband was becoming more and more important, but I was stuck on Dialup until 3 years ago, so my options were slim. The first Massively Multiplayer Online Game that I played was EverQuest, which I got bored with pretty fast.

 

Still, systems that are today considered older fascinate me a lot. As I learn more about programming, I look at some older games and am amazed at how the coders were able to get intricate titles to run on limited platforms and wonder myself what I could do with them.