Andrew Davie

May 19, 2023

23 minutes ago, Propane13 said:

That's a pretty good title screen. The Martian Background really helps!

I have been thinking about your "release as a series" cartridge concept. I like it a lot; it's unique. And, I think there may be a way to allow more game accessibility while providing the same concept. As a story element, let's say that your character wasn't always a space traveller; in the past, they were a construction worker. One day, while using heavy machinery on a job site, they unexpectedly exposed two glowing artifacts... and they were rather curious. It certainly got your character's attention. You took the two artifacts to be analyzed by scientists. They both appeared to be alien in origin, containing a story about a Lost Civilization that had once traveled the Solar System. There was a strange picture one artifact that included 10 planets instead of 9-- evidence of Planet X! There appeared to be a partial code on that artifact, but it didn't make any sense. Maybe it was just a part of a set? Something was missing. Analysis of the second artifact showed that it contained a clear set of coordinates. But, to where? Talking with astronomers, you learned it could only be one place-- Venus. It seems to indicate that there's another artifact to be found there. The call to adventure was set! You decided to become an astronaut and see where adventure takes you. Maybe you could find Planet X?! And, with your knowledge in construction, you're the best person for the job.

Let's take the Mercury cartridge, for example. If you get complete the first 80% of the levels in the game, you find the first artifact from the Lost Civilization! It contains some coordinates (e.g. a passcode) where the Lost Civilization placed their colony on the next planet, e.g. Venus. But, you still have to explore the last 20% of the levels in the "Lost Colony" area to uncover the second artifact, which would be crucial to finding Planet X. Anyone could buy the Venus cartridge and play through 80%. But, when the Lost Colony is found, a key is needed-- the passcode from the first artifact on Mercury. If done correctly, 2 things happen: you can play the Lost Colony on Venus, and you get the passcode unlock the Lost Colony on Mars. Completing the Lost Colony on Venus gets you another 1/9 of the puzzle for the whereabouts of Planet X. The Planet X cart could be purchased, of course, but the game couldn't be played without finishing all planets' Lost Colony sections and getting those passcodes. If you want to make it so that people can't post such passcodes online, you could have each player have a unique seed for their passcodes.

Some refinement of the idea is needed, but it would allow for players to be able try a lot of cartridges if they wanted, but to be a true completionist, they would need to complete everything in order. Could be fun.

Very interesting. My secret plans laid bare . But who would complain if I could release a single planet on cart and make the cart as cheap as possible. Yes, you buy all 10 and you have to pay a "fortune" but still, that is for completionists. Some/most people could buy just one and have much of the experience for a relatively cheap price. And I'd be able to focus on planet by planet and do a release when each is finished. As to passcodes/seeds -- in such low-run cartridges I'd be able to have a unique serial number embedded in each cart, so the passcodes would be unique to the cart. No possibility of sharing codes at all.

Thanks for the post and ideas

May 19, 2023

WenHop_20230519@18_30_18.bin

May 19, 2023

Bit of a mockup of a title screen. Thought I should put something on there. The BD one took months of tweaking; this one about half an hour. Colours need improving, and definition of spacesuit. But at least it's something.

May 19, 2023

12 hours ago, ZeroPage Homebrew said:

Very happy with my score of 111 on Pro mode on the show but sadly it seems to have disconnected with the PlusStore before submitting it even though it got my score of 36 in the game just before it. @Al_Nafuur, would you be able to manually add this score to the table with the pic below? 🙂

Direct link to high score run here (starts at 48m21s): https://youtu.be/JJcidDiEufk?t=2901

- James

This just seems.... a bit desperate.

May 18, 2023

1 hour ago, insertclevernamehere said:

So there won't ever be an AtariAge release of a final, finished game?

No plans.

May 17, 2023

Finding myself short of time to do any work on this; have been working late hours to get some work priorities sorted.

Had a brief review of the code tonight, and fixed a negative-gravity bug where the digging didn't work. You can skip ahead screens with F1 (SELECT), so there's a bit of variety here. I also modified the wyrms so that they expand in length when grabbing dogecoin, and when they hit a dead end they (slowly) reduce in length. It's working nicely now. Anyhow, this is likely close to the version I'll do some proto boards of, unless anyone finds any significant bugs.

I was quite happy with the gameplay here, when I came back to it. Don't forget the double-click to show the tool menu overlay/icon, too... just to show what's planned in the future. But for now, progress might be pretty intermittent/nonexistent. I'll make a post when I have a demo board running on actual hardware.

WenHop_20230517@21_08_16.bin

May 7, 2023

3 hours ago, Prizrak said:

Will the carts follow along with the betas? Like consumer flashable carts to keep them updated or are you thinking just carts when you've reached a completed product and go to final testing?

Following along with betas, I plan to make myself a small batch of carts ever 6 months or so just so I have a hardware version of the beta.

May 7, 2023

In this version, wyrms get longer when they "eat" dogecoin. It's the old "snake" game, really. They don't get shorter though. I could probably include that too. In the view I spend a few minutes playing with this game mechanic. I kinda like it. The long long long worms provide some interesting ideas for wyrms blocking you from stuff.

WenHop_20230507@23_58_02.bin

May 7, 2023

3 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Hm, what I played looked nothing like this.

It's got two menu options at the start. Gives two different games, by the look of it.

May 7, 2023

Following on from my previous musing about making hardware prototypes, I'm going ahead with this. My thinking is that I usually don't finish things, or at least take a very long time to finish things. I really want some actual cartridge hardware - even in prototype form - so I can say I actually made the physical '2600 cartridge. Am ordering a run of 10, just so I have some handy. Might make an updated run every 6 months or so.

May 5, 2023

13 hours ago, CapitanClassic said:

It’s only dangerous, because us humans put too much stock in these ChatGPT AIs. These programs are pretty good at what they are designed to be, a real-time natural language parser, that responds in a human-like conversational manner. Just don’t believe the advertising, since only marketers are bigger liars than Chat-GPT, “Get instant and accurate responses.” —App Store Copy.

It's dangerous because people have been conditioned to think of computers as infallible, and anything that comes out of a computer must be true. In this day and age where even infallible truths are being questioned by the gullible (flat earth, didn't land on the moon) and there's misinformation everywhere... the addition of AI systems which confidently proclaim complete falsehoods as if they were gospel truth... is in my view a great danger.

May 5, 2023

13 hours ago, bent_pin said:

Do we really write programs that way though?

No, we don't. My point being that it's doing an amazing job considering it's not pre-planning the code it is generating. It is generating word-by-word in a probabilistic fashion. It's quite incredible it creates anything meaningful at all. But it does. Also lots of garbage. People are assigning too much "intelligence" to this process. It's an incredible "large language model" generating most-probable next word in a sequence. It's AI, but not as we expected it.

May 4, 2023

Looks like there's a bit of a crash in the last version. Appears to be related to being near the top of the screen, or perhaps having something over your head and the wyrm nearby. Will fix, so no need to report.

This video is just a bit of an early look at underwater action. Lots of bubbles, and the player breathing. If you look carefully the water surface is sort of going up and down in a slow wave, too. I need to have a think about how to get swimming gameplay in. i may not. Too much to do, not enough bytes.

Kinda toying with the idea of making a small run of prototypes just so I have actual hardware in my hands I can plug in and show off what the '2600 can really do.

May 4, 2023

Well, let's just say it does a far better job at generating a program word-by-word without going back and correcting a single thing, than most humans. As a developer I have found it very useful to explore different solutions to a problem and then choosing one and finishing it myself. But it is a bit sobering when you know what you're doing and you can clearly see the errors it's making. What bothers me most, I think, is the "confidence" it appears to have in its answers - and the nonchalant apology it gives when you point out its errors. "Oh you're right... HERE'S the real answer." I am truly astounded by what these systems are doing, though. It's just not what I expected from an AI; this concept of being convincingly wrong with plausible answers that are effectively completely made up. It's dangerous.

May 3, 2023

You know, I'm not saying I'm going to do this... but it's in my thoughts --- release a 10-planet set, a planet at a time. Make them as cheap as possible, and allow myself to create significantly different planets and graphics (well, to some extent) without worrying about memory limitations. So you could play Wen Hop for cheap (relatively) but the whole "mission" so to speak would involve a 10-cart set -- planets 1-9 followed by planet X. Well, it's different and kinda appeals to me. Nobody's gonna really be happy though if they want the full "journey" as it would be a few hundred dollars : But still... interesting.

<edit>... and I only sell you planet n+1 with a screenshot showing successful completion of planet n.

May 3, 2023

Disaster! Wen Hop fell off the first page of the forum results and I just couldn't let that happen. so here's an update. I have been quite busy with work things so haven't had a chance to play with this for a while. But, coming back to it... pretty cool. I've done a bit of work on the wyrms. They are processing-intensive, and for speed reasons (wyrm speed, not game-speed) I've been running them at half-game-frame rate. That is, process all the wyrms every 2nd game frame. It was running out of time when there were a lot of wyrms. This version uses the quite simple change to the wyrm loop... from this:

    if (gameFrame & 1)
        return;

    for (int wyrm = 0; wyrm < WYRM_POP; wyrm++) {

... to this...

    for (int wyrm = gameFrame & 1; wyrm < WYRM_POP; wyrm += 2) {

So that doesn't look like much but it essentially halves the processing time required for wyrms, and so I can run a lot more of them at the same time. In the attached video I spend a fair bit of time dicking around just having fun looking at stuff. but towards the end you can see a bunch of wyrms under lava. They now replicate when under lava, and once they are under lava they will remain there. This could be a game mechanic, maybe. To prevent the wyrms from eating your doge you trap them (as shown earlier), or you "lure" them under lava, where they will remain. Note the large number of wyrms near the end of video.

Another game mechanic I "accidentally" discovered is when you have a rock above you and you want to move down, then previously you couldn't -- you would just die. But now you can "lay pipe"; that is, hold the button while moving down. You will leave pipe behind you and the rock above will not fall. It's not very intuitive but a real handy "trick" to have up your sleeve when there's lots of stuff above you and you wanna go downwards. Lay pipe.

I checked this runs on Stella, so hopefully OK.

WenHop_20230503@23_10_30.bin

April 26, 2023

10 minutes ago, CrazyChris said:

I can't seem to move the guy around in this version?

Oh well. Move on to another. I've removed the binary.

April 25, 2023

9 minutes ago, Propane13 said:

Neat! Did it automatically create the spigot?

Yes, but it's not functioning properly yet.

April 24, 2023

Although blindingly obvious with 20/20 hindsight, it had never occurred to me that laying pipes could be used to block off areas of the screen for gameplay purposes. Here I use pipes to entrap one of those annoying wyrms that keep eating all the dogecoin. Works well, in terms of game mechanics. Gonna keep that and use as a requirement for some screens/planets.

April 23, 2023

The full source code is now publicly shared/available at https://github.com/andrew-davie/WenHop

It's all a bit of a hack; not a professional effort. No criticisms please.

April 22, 2023

I broke the "conglomerate" code. That's where dogeodes are adjacent to dogecoin, and one converts to the other. It's supposed to be a chain reaction (which it is), but in one phase only. Trying to fix the "square sides" on blocks of dogeodes, where one side has changed (e.g., to a dogecoin) - I accidentally triggered waves of conversions. This is not what I really want, but the effect is pretty cool so I thought I'd throw up a video of this bug.

April 22, 2023

9 hours ago, Propane13 said:

... It would be fun to see a level with a small crusher pointed down at the tail end of the bottom-most conveyor belt of a series, and then trigger a landslide above with destructible rocks just to see all those elements playing together (essentially, a smashing machine).

Here's a crusher which "takes out" anything at the end of a conveyor belt. I currently have the items "locked" when being crushed, but it's easy to allow them to "escape" if there's a place to go to.

9 hours ago, Propane13 said:

While I realize coding it could be potentially difficult, do you want the player to also move sideways when standing on the conveyor belt?

Easy enough to do, but I don't really like this option. I might play with this later, but not for now.

WenHop_20230422@19_17_15.bin

April 21, 2023

Here's a short video showing some of the conveyor belts in operation. The upper one shifts objects right. The lower... left. I can see a sort of "mechanical world" where there are grinders. crushers, conveyors, taps, etc. Not sure if it's going to stay; still needs some work... but it's interesting at least.

WenHop_20230421@23_54_18.bin

April 20, 2023

2 minutes ago, rbairos said:

Not sure if I still have the mvc file for the Dragon's Lair video, but there may be other mvc files floating around on this thread.

I have a 160 MB 'dragonsLair.mvc' on my machine but I'm not setup anymore to do these. I have put a small snippet of a screen recording up. But it's rather dim, sorry...

April 15, 2023

The grinders would also work as gears, and I had a couple of thoughts around this. The first was that the "gears" start up non-animating, and a "chain" of gears snaking up the screen could be connected to some sort of sliding (vertically or horizontally) barrier. For example, gears could be connected to a heavy door. As you somehow turn the gears on, the one you turn on starts turning, which turns on the one(s) beside it, etc., etc., and eventually they raise the heavy door.

Another thing I though of is a conveyor belt. Not sure what it might be used for - perhaps to simply transport inaccessible dogeodes to where you can actually get them. You'd need to turn the conveyor belt on. Here I have implemented a preliminary test-version just to see how a conveyor belt might work in the game. It's OK. This leads to the idea of a "mechanical world" where there's lots of underground machinery (crushers, grinders, doors. platforms. conveyor belts) and you need to somehow hook up or activate them in the right sequence to get through it or access the dogecoin.

WenHop_20230416@00_40_54.bin

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