Minigames
It has been rather quiet for me on the Atari front lately, after all of the excitement of the show. Since I returned the other facets of life have been taking up all my time, leaving little room for anything Atari related. It is that time of year when an endless succession of parties and engagements fill up the weekends, and work becomes hectic trying to meet all of those arbritrary end-of-year deadlines. I suspect that I won't have much time now to work on PoP until the New Year, though there has been some minor progress: I have started the code cleanup in earnest, and there is a new implementation of the swords, thanks to the suggestions of several folks here. However, none of these changes are visible on-screen yet, so I will save this for another entry.The real news for me at the moment concerns programming work that I did in the past, namely my minigame competition entries. Just before the vgXpo show there was a mad scramble to release the 2005 minigame multicart containing a selection of Atari 2600 minigames from this years competition, which included three of my own games. There was some concern that the cart wouldn't be ready in time, as there were so many different people involved, and a lot of last-minute tweaks required. However, in the end the cart and manual turned out great, and I am very grateful for the hard work of everyone involved. Nonetheless, I was still eager to see the outcome of the competition itself, and after what seemed like a very long wait, the results were finally revealed yesterday.There were a large number of Atari 2600 entries (15 in total) to the competition this year, possibly inspired by Atari success in previous years. Personally, I used the competition as an opportunity to learn and develop my Atari programming skills. I was delighted to see that my first ever Atari game (Hunchy) was ranked 5th in the 1K competition! My other entires also achieved respectable rankings, despite my fears at the presence of another Hunchback-inspired competition entry! The highest-ranked 2600 entry (2nd) was Fred Quimby's "Zirconium" which he thoroughly deserves as it is a great game (and also appeared on the minigame multicart). The majority of the other 2600 entries also achieved reasonable rankings, though I personally think that Strat-O-Gems, Marble Jumper, and SDI were underrated, while AStar was possibly a little overrated. Nonetheless, it was a good showing for the Atari 2600, and a great effort from everyone involved. One of the good things about a competition such as this is that it generates feedback from outside the Atari 2600 community. I think there is sometimes a tendancy within the community to concentrate primarily on the technical aspects of game creation, as the Atari is so hard to program. Also, there is often a reluctance to critically evaluate the work of others, when it is clear how much hard work they have put into a project. However, in this competition the games are evaluated purely for "fun", and the resulting comments are often brutally honest! Based on these comments I can see that both of my Hunchy games could be improved, e.g. removing the sound effects, and tweaking the difficulty curve. I was also surprised at the positive comments about Jetman, and I am now considering an extended 4K version as a future project. On this note, my own comments do not seem to have appeared on the website yet, but I have mailed the administrator and hopefully they should appear soon. Enerything considered, I think the competition was a good motivating experience for me, and I am looking forward eagerly to next year.EDIT: My comments have now appeared on the minigame results pages.Chris
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