TROGBlog

Hi there!

 

Cool another developer ready! Added to my favourites list!

 

Greetings,

Manuel

Nice to see you back. I admit I was concerned by your long absence.

Nice to see you back in action! Master of Arcturus is one of my favorite 2600 games; any chance at all of a cart release someday?

 

Looking forward to seeing what else you have in store.

Nice to see you back in action!  Master of Arcturus is one of my favorite 2600 games; any chance at all of a cart release someday? 

 

Looking forward to seeing what else you have in store.

Hi vdub_bobby,

 

I'm really glad to hear you liked Master of Arcturus. I was wondering if anyone ever played that game after the mini competition was over. I still play it occasionally. The higher difficultly levels are challenging for me, even though I know exactly what the AI is thinking.

 

I need to update the documentation for that game. My original intent was for the player to figure out on their own what the various difficultly levels affect. But, I think that could frustrate some people into not playing the game. As an alternative, I'll add a full description of the difficultly levels to the user manual, along with a spoiler warning to explain my original intent. Level 64 is supposed to be next to impossible to beat. I can only beat it about 1 in 10 games.

 

My main goal in writting that game was to capture the feel of a 3X simulation game (explore, expand, exterminate.) Due to the limited resources of the 2600, the game only has 8 worlds, but this actually has a useful side-effect. The games only take about a half an hour to play. Master of Orion takes about 40 hours to complete a campaign, which eventually forced me to stop playing it. But with Master of Arcturus, I can pick it up any time and enjoy a quick campaign, and still get the satisfaction of conquering the galaxy.

 

MoA will be made into a cartridge, if the demand is there. I do need to clear out a few minor bugs before I commit the code to ROM. Hopefully I can talk my brother into providing some artwork for the game. He's a great artist with GIMP. I'll post a request for pre-orders when the game is ready to go, to determine how many copies to make.

Glad to hear that you still have further plans for MoA.

 

Warcraft II and similar RTS-type games are some of my favorite games and I've been thinking about how I could write one for the 2600. Probably something similar to Crimson Warfare would be doable, I think.

 

But anyway, that's why I've enjoyed MoA so much. Not quite the same, but similar.

 

Have you considered releasing MoA through AA?

Glad to hear that you still have further plans for MoA.

 

Warcraft II and similar RTS-type games are some of my favorite games and I've been thinking about how I could write one for the 2600.  Probably something similar to Crimson Warfare would be doable, I think.

 

But anyway, that's why I've enjoyed MoA so much.  Not quite the same, but similar.

 

Have you considered releasing MoA through AA?

 

The largest obsticale to writing an RTS for the 2600 is RAM. An RTS implies lots of variables, something the 2600 can't handle with its 128 bytes of RAM. However, a great RTS game could be written with the Supercharger. I'm leaning that way for future projects, and possibly for the Supercharger contest.

 

I've only done minimal research on publishing a cart, but AA looks like the way to go.

Here's another vote for putting MoA on cartridge!

 

Publishers include: AtariAge, Packrat Videogames and 8-Bit Classics.

 

Do you/will you have the source code available to study? I'm interested in the text generation as I'm playing around with writing a 2600 text adventure.

 

And by "playing" I mean I've done a little bit here and there over a looong time! Been busy with school, etc.