jrok

I think there must be a possiblity to do this in the way Missile Command or Etch-a-Sketch draw lines. Is it a player sprite? The Idea is, that the area will be filled with PF graphics if you reach the end (and the line disappears). When yo do not draw a line, your player is a dot like the enemies. If I'm not mistaken, aren't the lines in missile command only possible because they have vertical trajectories - ie. they are limited in the number that can be drawn on the same horizontal line (to three per line, I think)?

I'm a little unclear why everyone seems to think ithat the "slice" line needs to be a single pixel vector. Wouldn't it be much simpler to just draw this path with the pfpixels, (a la sssnake and "tron light cycles") and call it a day? If we are worried about the detoriorated look, we could make up for it with another visual device, like changing the color of the entire playfield as it gets closer to completion.

Yep. You can't do operations inside of a pfpixel/hline/vline. They just want a value (either static or variable).

I don't agree with this statement at all. Maybe some programmers feel more comfortable meticulously mapping out every single detail of game before they start coding, but overplanning can also lead you down a dark path, until one day you find yourself rambling on about Knight Rider sales projections in the back of a Kinkos. One of the really neat-o things about bB is that you can start prototyping immediately, and easily futz around each element and even the entire game structure all the way to completion. No matter what language or platform I'm working in, I feel like too much pre-design and planning could distract me from all the experimentation and happy accidents that lead to discovering what's "fun" about a game. I think there's no right way to approach game design, really. I've worked in the interior design field for years, and sometimes the best projects started with something as simple as a word or a picture or a song, than mutated and evolved until they were really great, fleshed out ideas. Not to mention that the community here is perfect for helping to create and rethink major design elements along the way based on constant, near instanteous feedback from the very market you are designing for... not many designers have that advantage. In short, whatever works, works! Cheers, Jarod.

Also Spongebob Squarepants Jellyfishin', which, if it wasn't complete, it was pretty darn near close. I really admire how prolific he is, and how he invites everyone in to his creative process. But most importantly, his games are fun! Sometimes its easier to sit in the stands and take pot-shots than step in the ring and prove yourself, I guess.

Well, I've been doing a little work with animating Playfield pixels lately. You might want to look at some of the code I posted here for ideas. It's sort of commented Basically, I think you are going to attach a variable to the pfpixel command to mark the "tip" of your arrow, then use a series of pfpixel commands (or pfhline/pfvline) to form the shape, size and direction of your arrow. If you look at my code and have any questions, feel free to ask. Cheers! Jarod.

i took out all the stuff about how i was going to kill myself. I'm not going to. Well, now I feel like Sir Jackass Dickhole for thinking it was the scanline count. Dude, I don't know what else is going on in your life, but your game is pretty great. Jealous m'f'ers aside, everyone in creation thinks its great. Maybe that doesn't mean much in the outside world, but isn't that why we go inside? Regards, J

The word "challenging" is the only problem I have with this statement. After a few months of working with bB, it seems that to program truly challenging A.I. would just require resources that Atari BASIC (or, in some ways, the entire 6502 framework) just cannot afford. Things like A*, Bayesian learning and even simple tree searching are off the table. With very few exceptions, Atari robots are pretty much gonna be all balls, no brains. Once I realized that, I decided to approach atari A.I design using the "if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck" Turing model. I guess the following are pretty much the rules I set upon myself when trying to design an AI for bBASIC. The Brain is always "on", meaning that the robot does not respond directly to conditions, but rather asks on a regular basis whether conditions are present that it might want to respond to. To me, this sets up a realistic stimuli/response rhythm that can tighten up as more intelligent enemies are revealed. Throwing in a single "reaction timer" variable for this brain loop seems inexpensive to me, since you might also be able to use it for other things that occur regularly. Decision nodes are randomly selected. Set up a number of decision nodes detailing the actions that a robot might want to take. These should be similar to the sort of actions a human player might want to take; things like "Chase", "Shoot at the Enemy", "Run Away", "Move in a Random Direction" etc. The robot randomly selects a new course of action every time his brain "loops." Okay - decisions are randomly selected, but they are also weighted. Conditions and "personality" should affect the little bastard, allowing "smarter" robots to emerge over time. For instance, a robot may randomly "choose" to remain still for a loop, but if a shot at the player is available (condition) and he is a generally pissed-off, hardcore sort of fellow(variable) then he will probably ignore that Hamlet-esque node and take a shot at you anyway. When in doubt, cheap 'em out. To artificially enhance the challenge, you sometimes have to let the robot do a few things that, all things considered, seem sort of unfair. For instance, in Circus Galacticus the enemy gladiators don't have to wait as long to charge up a new laser beam - and, at higher levels, don't have to wait at all. Cheapass A.I. rules could let the enemy move at lightening speeds, routinely sense-and-evade gunfire, instantly attack when the player is in range and generally defy the rules of the gameworld whenever it's convenient. I guess this rule is a sort of tightrope act... you let the robot's become too unfair, and it ruins the enjoyment of the game (and sometimes, the joystick, the television screen, your marriage, etc). If they are too restricted however, even at the higher levels of play, then the game is too easy. I suppose the most challenging enemy would be a robot that would be (almost) perfect, (nearly) all of the time, allowing the best players some tiny window to rage against the machine. I don't know why I'm pontificating on this. I suppose bB enemy A.I. probably deserves its own thread. Cheers, Jarod.

If that's true, that's a shame. I thought this was coming along quite well! I hope its not some personal problem, but if it's the scanline count you're concerned about, you might consider just reducing the playfield resolution by one line.. I know that did the trick for me when my timing was off. Cheers, Jarod.

Thanks. In the map, it seems the player pointers use the same naming convention as in the standard kernel (i.e. player2pointerlo, player2pointerhi, player2height), and the compiler gives no errors when I target these. However, any adjustments I make to them in my code don't seem to show up in the BIN, while the same adjustments seem to work fine on players 0 and 1 in the standard kernel. Has anyone else noticed this. Cheers, Jarod.

I dunno.. the way I remember it, Jack never "fights" the Giant. He escapes him, then kills him by chopping down the beanstalk while the Giant is still climbing down it. Maybe what's needed is an inverted version of Level Two, where Jack is climbing down, and with the Giant appearing above him if the player takes more than a couple of seconds to complete a screen. Just my $0.02, Jarod EDT: Actually, just to add another gameplay element it might be fun to place an axe at the final screen of such a "chase" level, drawn with the ball and missile. Jack needs to grab it, then mash the button to chop down the stalk before the giant finishes his descent and eats him. Different, more intense music here might be also great actually, and help create some climactic drama!

One more thing... If anyone, anywhere is actually playing this game with some regularity, could you let me know your high score? For my next phase of development I'm really trying to focus on difficulty progression, and feedback on the current difficulty would be a fabulous help. Thanks! Jarod.

I re-read my comment, and I guess I apologize since the thread was explicitly about who actually LIKED Pac-Man 2600. Thinking back on it, there were probably a few things to like about it. It was almost a "solvable" game, if you put enough time into it, and the degree that it differed from the arcade version probably helped the challenge factor. I do remember some degree of satisfaction in "figuring it out." I guess the big problem was that - like the 2600 Donkey Kong - when you take a simple concept and formula that people are already very familiar with and dress it down even further, it is going to detract from the experience, period. At some level, I think this became more of an experiment in licensing/marketing than it was not about writing a good, fun game. It wasn't even about distilling what was fun about the game (outwitting the ghosts, mastering the levels), but rather about tying in some of the well-known graphic concepts to an inherently inferior set of mechanics. I personally didn't care so much that the ghosts weren't different colors or that Pac-man had an "eye"; I just didn't get that Pac-Man "feel" I got when I was in the arcade. If the Pac-Man arcade cabinet never existed, K.C. Munchkin, Alien and Lock N' Chase would've easily gotten jammed in my 2600 quicker than Pac-Man. On its own merits, it would've seemed like a pale comparison of those titles, rather than the other way around. Just my $0.02, Jarod.

I did not like this game. Honestly, if the capital and quality assurance standards weren't availiable to make a halfway decent port, I wish they had made a different maze-game with alternate game mechanics and graphics instead of just relying on the license name recognition to artificially boost sales. "Alien" was also a maze-game that was based on a license in order to help move the merchandise, but Fox actually managed to make a good game with some interesting variations on the core Pac-Man gameplay. I had a lot of fun playing "Alien." Whenever I played Pac-Man, I mainly just felt cheated.

Thanks to everyone for the ideas and advice on the title screen. I've attached a BIN with the latest version. Cheers and Happy New Year, Jarod. Circus_Galacticus_m1_d4_y09.bin Circus_Galacticus_m1_d4_y09.zip

Dude, don't laugh! I happen to know several Internet Cafe managers who are warm to Basic. With their help, I project quarterly earnings somewhere in the 10 to 11 dollar range. Our biggest design challenge right now is how to fit Hasselhoff's hairdo into 4k.

I have a love/hate relationship with this game. The Hate: My brother would HOG it. This is one of those games where - if you were "in the zone" - you could literally keep at it for hours. Sometimes he would just run the damn thing, and if it hadn't been for the lack of a pause feature, I have no doubt he'd still be playing it today, demolishing wave after wave of arthitritic artillery gunners from the comfort of his convalescent bed. The Love: The sound and godlike fury of the laser blast pounding those gunners to dust was pure retro poetry.

Just for kicks, has anyone tried to do this? I mean, the ridiculous design doc aside, has anyone given this a shot? I've considered trying something, just for kicks. I've been wanting to take a crack at the music, and I guess if we got that down, we'd be halfway there. This thing has community project written all over it, ya know? Jarod.

Is there a way to target playerxpointerhi, playerxpointerlo and playerxheight for virtual sprites 1-5 in batari's multisprite kernel? Thanks in advance, Jarod.

New Update (Probably the last one for today, then I really ought to go do some last-minute holiday shopping): I've been toying with the idea of special "boss" battles, so I thought I'd test out an example. In this build, level 4 pits you against a giant freak instead of the normal gladiator. There's not much special going on with him yet, apart the fact that he has a few more hitpoints and is a bit harder to hit (headshots only). I am thinking of adding special rules for this guy, such as a deadly touch and the ability to destroy terrain just by running into it. Normally you wouldn't run afoul of this doofus so early on in play, but I thought I'd throw him in for some feedback. Circus_Galacticus_bosses.bin Circus_Galacticus_bosses.zip Cheers, Jarod.

I see what you mean now. That dude is ugly. The title "Circus Galactus" is just a bug right now. I will eventually fix it, or just eliminate the title screen entirely. The problem is that (at 30hz) I only have 32 pixels across to fit in the word "Galacticus," which has 10 characters. 32/10 = 3.2, meaning that even if every non-"I" letter was only three pixels wide (which, I think, is impossible with the letter "G"), they couldn't really have any spaces between them, which would make them unreadable. I suppose I could go 20hz for the title screen, but that really "hurts" my eyes. I'll just call it an unfixed bug for now. Thanks, Jarod.

Latest version: Revised Sound Effects Added Enemies Added Title Screen Altered Shield and Death Zone graphics and timing Circus_Galacticus_m12_d23_y08.bin Circus_Galacticus_m12_d23_y08.zip

The office is incredibly empty, so I feel like I might have my first full day to work on this game. Been futzing around with several elements this morning. Sound FX: sound effects for lasers, and added an ominous rumble for when the shield zones seal closed. Graphics Revised the shield zone effect and the death zone effect. Added more enemy styles for a current total of sixteen before looping. Difficulty/Leveling I'm starting to fool around with the leveling logic, trying to locate a nice balance. I've been playtesting a lot to try to fine tune the leveling aspect of the game, but I could really use some insights from other people who are playing the game. Even top scores or the color pattern of the gladiator who killed you would be helpful, but if you notice anything else like ways to solve or "cheap-shot" the game (or, ways in which the game is "cheap-shot'ting" you) would be extremely helpful. Circus_Galacticus_m12_d23_y08.bin Circus_Galacticus_m12_d23_y08.zip Thanks in advance, Jarod.

Thanks! That's pretty much my dream, I guess.

New Update: Here's a reworked version of the laser beam sound behavior. For player beams, I've added a "charge-up" sound effect for when you are charging your gun, so that you know when it is charged and primed for full range. I also modified the sound progression of the beam for a more brassy feel, and altered sound collision events so that the beam produces different tones based on how far away the target was, and whether or not it hit your opponent. I kept the original enemy beam sounds in so players could compare and contrast. As always, any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks! Jarod. Circus_Galacticus_m12_d22_y08_2_.bin Circus_Galacticus_m12_d22_y08_2_.zip