NAveryW

Thanks for the offer. I'd prefer to design the label anyway so I can make sure it fits my preferences. I'd like to wait until I finish animating the first episode of Enthalpy before making the cart, though. Perhaps I'll actually get some kind of small consumer demand. Since I feel that the game remains too easy after you reach eleven points, and it gets way too hard once you reach twenty-one points, I updated the game to incorporate multiple difficulty levels. If you flip one difficulty switch, the game stops increasing in speed once you reach eleven points. If both switches are flipped, you get a really boring game in which the speed doesn't increase at all. I have a feeling I got the switches set backwards, but otherwise Stella automatically has it set to where the speed doesn't increase. Download the updated version here.

I'm not sure why, but this evening I had the thought to make a game in which you play as Tay Zonday. From there my first thought was that the gameplay would involve you avoiding chocolate rain as it falls from the sky. A bit later I realized that this would work perfectly as a clone of Custer's Revenge. Tay starts at the left side of the screen and has to go right to the microphone, avoiding the chocolate rain along the way, and press the button rapidly to sing. Every fifty points, he'll start back on the left side of the screen (because he's moving away from the microphone to breathe) and the game will get faster. If he gets splashed by chocolate rain three times, he will get a game over (feel the pain). I haven't started programming yet, as I'm still trying to decide on whether it'd be worth the work (mainly due to the complex music that would be pretty much required). I did make a sprite of Zonday, though.

I made a thread chronicling this game's development in the batariBasic subforum, and am presenting the game here for feedback now that I think it's complete. The game uses characters I have been writing stories of since I was eleven, and am currently working on an animated Flash series featuring them called Enthalpy. This is their first complete console game. You play an eleven-year-old boy named Nicholas: He's trying to perambulate. To score points, move him to the left side of the screen, then the right, then the left, then the right. That would be pretty simple, except that his archenemy, a transgenic pig named Piggly Oink... ...is constantly firing missiles at him. Nicholas must dodge the missiles while perambulating. He must also dodge something yellow that's bouncing around all over the place that will also kill him if it hits him. I don't know what the yellow object is, but boy is it dangerous. You can play the game online with jStella here, or download the .bin file here. Currently I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to make the game available on a cartridge via the AtariAge homebrew store. REASONS FOR DOING SO: -I'd love to own the game on an actual, professionally made cartridge, with a professionally made manual, even if nobody else would. -In my opinion, the game is just as fun as many other Atari 2600 games that were commercially released during the 1980s. -I recently formed a sole proprietorship which I mainly intend to use to distribute video games, and I intend to apply to become a licensed Nintendo developer soon. On the application, they want to know what systems you and your company have made games for in the past, and I'd be able to put an actual console game on the list. REASONS AGAINST DOING SO: -I can't really imagine anyone besides me wanting to buy such a game nowadays, especially since I'm making it freely available online. -I think the game gets a bit too hard once you get 21 points. Please let me know what you think. ^_^

I feel kind of bad about triple posting, but from my adventures in lurking that seems to be OK here as long as you have an update whenever you make a new post. I've finished what will be the final version of Pig Perambulator unless someone will help me make the speed increase more gradual. And maybe I'll add some title screen music once I've experimented more with that. Instead of attaching the .bin, I'll link you to my webpage where you can play the game in your browser here. Aside from graduating the speed change, if you have any other suggestions that might enhance the gameplay please let me know.

I didn't really like Piggly Oink's movement at all, as it turned out to be rather predictable, thus if the player were to figure out the pattern, he'd be able to traipse all over the place without getting hit. Therefore, I gave Piggly Oink a bit more sense about him by having him move right if Nicholas is to his right and move left if Nicholas is to his left. I also made him only do this every other frame, so his speed is not the same as Nicholas' and thus he's not constantly on top of him. Unfortunately, this, too, ends up being rather predictable. I'll probably add a ball bouncing around the playfield which you also need to avoid so as to keep the game from being too monotonous. Maybe I'll only have it appear once you reach a certain score. Ideally, I'd want Piggly Oink to move like the dragons in Dragonfire. I have no idea how to make him do that, of course. Furthermore, I still haven't figured out how to make the speed increase more gradual. No attachments this time since I'm continuing to change more things right away.

I first wrote the story of Piggly Oink's origin back when I was eleven (2001). Dunlap Pig Farm invented an "instant pig spray". It was a can full of pig DNA and some sort of substance that crystalized the biomatter into a fully grown pig once the spray was released. This criminal named Evil who had just escaped from prison was about to eat the Pillsbury Dougboy, and covered him with an "unsaturated superyeast" which caused the Doughboy to expand rapidly, eventually exploding. Dunlap Pig Farm was nearby, and some of the dough, along with one of the criminal's teeth, landed in the container of pig biomatter. The result was Piggly Oink. So, about this game. I added all of the sound effects except for the opening music. I'm not sure if I'm going to do anything with the background or not. I suppose I'll add some one-pixel-high clouds. I still want to find some way to make the speed increase more gradual (halp pl0x), and I've encountered a couple of glitches: -I use player0 and player1 to write out the text "GAME OVER" at the end. Player1 is occasionally flipped for a fraction of a second when the text first displays, and I can't figure out why, since I never flipped the sprite anywhere in the code. -To make Piggly Oink occasionally switch directions halfway across the screen, I made him have a ~50% chance of switching direction when his x value is 75. However, once he reaches his final speed, there's a chance he'll skip right over 75 every time he crosses it. I'm guessing there's a number around there that's a multiple of whatever his speed is, but I haven't found it yet. Piggly Oink automatically goes right if his x value is less than or equal to 18, and he automatically goes left if his x value is greater than or equal to 136. Can I calculate a number from that? So yes, I feel the game is now nearing completion, assuming I can figure out how to fix those bugs. If you're reading this, I'd like to know how fun you think it is. pera1.bin pera1.bas

Try using Fixed Point Variables . Thank you, that helps a lot!... sort of. I added a fixed point variable called "celerity" and made the speed dependent on that. I set the celerity to go up by 0.2 every time you score a point. However, the actual speed only goes up once the celerity variable becomes an integer. Which I suppose still works, but wasn't what I had in mind. If it's possible to do it the way I originally intended to without having to rewrite a lot of code, I'd still prefer to go that route. Nicholas is eleven years old, so I don't really think his reproductive system works well enough for him to be a rapist yet. =P I love your T&P game, though, and would buy it if it were still available... and if I had an actual Atari 2600. I've been trying to get one for quite some time, but so far have been unsuccessful. Anyway, Nicholas and Piggly Oink's history is a long and convoluted one that spans stories I've been writing since 2001. Piggly Oink himself isn't just a pig, but a hybrid with the DNA of a pig, a human, and the Pillsbury Doughboy. More than one screen, eh? That might make it a bit more interesting, but would defeat the purpose of my initial idea. The concept was to make this silly little game in which Nicholas is just trying to pace back and forth in a small area, but this ends up being rather difficult, as Piggly Oink is firing missiles at him. I'm planning to make more elaborate games once I finish this one, though. Again, I just wanted this to be an evasion game. You score points by perambulating, not by defeating enemies. Well, I've implemented everything I wanted to now except making the background more detailed and adding sound. And, as I said, I'd like to make the speed change a bit more gradual if I can figure out how to do that. As it is, here's the nigh complete version of the game. perambulator0.bas perambulator0.bin

A couple of nights ago I decided I wanted to make a Flash game in the style of an Atari 2600 game. While doing research on resolution, palette, etc., to make sure I was making the game as accurate a facsimile as possible, I came across bB. I had always read that the Atari 2600 was one of the most difficult systems to program for, since you had to write everything in assembly language, so I had stayed away from it in the past. But after looking into bB, I realized that making this as an actual Atari 2600 game may be almost as easy as making it in Flash would have been. So I spent the past couple of days working on the first version of my first ever 2600 homebrew, Pig Perambulator. The game features two characters from a Flash animation series I'm working on called Enthalpy. Nicholas as he appears in Enthalpy His archenemy Piggly Oink as he appears in Enthalpy The two characters as 4-bit sprites You play Nicholas. The object of the game is to pace back and forth, touching the left side of the screen, then the right, while avoiding the missiles that Piggly Oink fires at you. If you get hit by a missile, your game ends. Except wait a minute, this game isn't much fun at all! Not so much, no. Though I could hypothetically consider the game finished if I didn't care at all about making it good, there are many more elements which I wish to implement in future versions. These are: -A background that isn't so utterly bland (Expected difficulty: very easy) -Music for the title screen and sound effects for the main gameplay (Expected difficulty: I haven't tried yet, but it doesn't look that hard) -A flashing background when you get a game over (Expected difficulty: very easy) -A walk cycle animation for Piggly Oink (Expected difficulty: very easy) I also want the speed to gradually increase as you gain more points, since it's way too easy to avoid the missiles at this point. I have absolutely no idea how to do this, but I feel it's essential to keeping the gameplay from being ridiculously boring. If I increase the movement variables from 1 to 2, the speed doubles instantly, and I can't make objects move a number of pixels that isn't an integer. I really hope someone's able to help me with this, or the game will be nothing more than a quick gag. (YES, I'M SPECIFICALLY TALKING TO YOU.) perambulator.bas perambulator.bin