ThatDude

This is version 2.1 of Underwater Predator. (2.0 is unreleased, and it is going to stay unreleased. It's too buggy to play.) Here are the changes from 1.5: There is now a bit of background noise. The frequency and pitch change with every difficulty level. I've added a plastic bag which gets sucked into your open mouth, so keep your mouth shut when you're not eating! Unfortunately, the sprite looks like, well, rubbish, but not in the way I want it to. There are sound effects for eating yellow fish and dying. The sound for eating only uses one channel. Technically, the yellow fish are twice as common as everything else. In practice, it's barely noticeable. This is because of the limited random number functionality of the 2600. The missile barriers that nanochess asked for are now in the game, and show up every 240 frames (or slightly more often depending on the difficulty level; you're unlikely to get far enough into the game to notice). Here's my remaining TO-DO list: Add some music - "Have you played Atari today?" jingle on the Atari logo screen, and, of course, the opening bars to "Firework" by Katy Perry whenever the plastic bag is onscreen Make the black fish get bigger at 40 points (I just need to work out how to fix the collision detection) Add the Titanic, which, inconveniently, just keeps sinking over the top of the Predator. This was suggested to me by a friend, although I can't figure out how the Titanic would sink more than once. It'd also be an incredibly underwhelming Titanic, a whole 8 pixels wide! If possible, add another screen when the Predator reaches the top of the existing one, allowing him to jump out and eat a bird flying past. Add 2-player turn-based mode. Enjoy! Underwater_Predator_V2.1.bin predator.bas

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xybelt13s6d27w0/Underwater_Predator_V1.5.png I am apparently not allowed to use that extension in this community, so here's the link.

I managed to implement some of those ideas. There is now an energy bar that depletes slowly and increases when you eat yellow fish. If it gets to zero, obviously you lose a life. Black fish now home in on your player and kill you on touch. Fish are now animated. Yellow fish now dodge downwards if you're too close. I also included a buggy bit of code for randomly choosing a NUSIZ value for the black fish in the source. Uncomment lines 410-420, compile the game, and get to 40 points to see it in action. It certainly works but the collision detection fails with most values so it's commented out for now. predator.bas Underwater_Predator_V1.5.bin

Thanks for the code! If I run out of ROM space my plan is to rewrite the fading code so that it runs on a loop instead of being hardcoded. An increase in difficulty is always a good idea in my book. (And before anyone says anything, no, I'm not going to include every idea that gets thrown at me; but if it's good and I have enough ROM space to pull it off, I'll put it in the game.)

nanochess, thanks for playing my game. Those all sound like good ideas. I'd like to stick with a 4K ROM so I don't know if they'd all fit, especially alongside some of my own plans (i.e. 2 player mode) but I'll give it a try. That green stuff at the bottom is seaweed, although it's just decoration. Maybe I should make it deadly, but there's no reason to actually go down there at the moment (fish can't go down far enough).

I wouldn't put game sprites and text in the same league, but if you say so: Underwater_Predator_V1.1.bin Yellow looks nicer anyway, I'm sticking with it. Thanks! Edit: Whoops, forgot to upload the source code. All I did was change the colour of Player 0 in SetupGame and playgame, but technically this version can't be considered GPL unless I release the source, so: predator.bas

Underwater Predator By ThatDude (Declan Hoare) EDIT: All updates will be posted with their own post to this topic. If you want the latest version, go to the last post in this topic by me. I would appreciate it if you didn't take my name out of this game's credits or sell the game without my permission. Technically, the latter is legal, but I would obviously prefer that you didn't. This is the first version of my first ever working Atari 2600 game, distributed under the GPL version 3. Please let me know what you think and give suggestions for improvements! You are a shark (in the loosest sense of the word ) flying around in SPAAAACE! underwater, surprisingly. You have to eat the "gold"fish (although because of the 2600's limited pallette, they're really light yellow) while avoiding black fish, which are rotten but somehow still alive and swimming (SHHH, don't question these things). Every 20 points, the speed of the fish increases, and although the first speed is downright boring, it quickly gets more interesting. You use the stick to move and the button to eat. Source code (warning: extremely messy): predator.bas NTSC ROM: Underwater_Predator_V1.bin I haven't made a PAL ROM at the time of this posting, but I definitely will at some point - I live in a PAL region, after all. z26 and Stella both run this game fine, although I don't have a Harmony cart (or, for that matter, a 2600) so I can't be sure if it works on real hardware. Enjoy!

Edit: Nevermind. The problem was with the = 1 that somehow got after the joy0fire statement on the second-last line. How did it get there? I don't know. Does anyone have any idea where I messed up? This program used to compile and run, but ever since I tried to make the reset switch work it stopped compiling, even after I removed the offending code... The alleged syntax error is in a different place every time I try to compile the program. Usually it's either at the start of the first line, or the end of the last line. Here is the code attached: predator.bas Here it is in code tags: rem batari Basic Program rem created 8/06/2014 1:59:51 PM by Visual bB Version 1.0.0.554 set kernel_options pfcolors no_blank_lines set romsize 8kSC pfcolors: $AE $AC $AA $A8 $A6 $A4 $A2 $A0 $2A $28 $24 end playfield: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX............XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX............XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX............XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX end AtariLogo player0: %00100001 %01010010 %10001010 %10001010 %10001001 %00000000 %11100001 %00010001 %00001001 %00001001 %00000101 %00000101 %00000101 %00000101 %00000101 %00000101 end player1: %11000110 %00000001 %00000110 %00001000 %11000110 %00000000 %00001110 %00010000 %00100000 %00100000 %01000000 %01000000 %01000000 %01000000 %01000000 %01000000 end COLUBK = $00 var0 = 0 var1 = 0 var3 = 0 draw_loop if var3 = 1 then gosub changesprites1 if var3 = 3 then gosub changesprites2 if var0 = 0 then gosub logos if var0 = 1 then gosub titlehold drawscreen goto draw_loop logos if var1 < 12 then var2 = var1 if var3 = 0 then if var1 = 12 then AUDV0 = 4 if var3 = 0 then if var1 = 12 then AUDC0 = 4 if var3 = 0 then if var1 = 12 then AUDF0 = 7 if var3 = 0 then if var1 = 12 then AUDV1 = 4 if var3 = 0 then if var1 = 12 then AUDC1 = 2 if var3 = 0 then if var1 = 12 then AUDF1 = 5 if var3 = 0 then if var1 = 14 then AUDV0 = 0 if var3 = 0 then if var1 = 14 then AUDC0 = 0 if var3 = 0 then if var1 = 14 then AUDF0 = 0 if var3 = 0 then if var1 = 14 then AUDV1 = 0 if var3 = 0 then if var1 = 14 then AUDC1 = 0 if var3 = 0 then if var1 = 14 then AUDF1 = 0 if var1 = 87 then if var3 = 4 then var2 = 0 if var1 = 87 then if var3 = 4 then var0 = 1 if var1 = 87 then if var3 = 4 then return if var1 = 87 then var2 = 11 if var1 = 88 then var2 = 10 if var1 = 89 then var2 = 9 if var1 = 90 then var2 = 8 if var1 = 91 then var2 = 7 if var1 = 92 then var2 = 6 if var1 = 93 then var2 = 5 if var1 = 94 then var2 = 4 if var1 = 95 then var2 = 3 if var1 = 96 then var2 = 2 if var1 = 97 then var2 = 1 if var1 = 98 then var2 = 0 if var1 = 99 then var3 = var3 + 1 if var1 = 99 then var1 = 0 if var1 = 99 then var2 = 0 player0x = 75 player0y = 35 player1x = 83 player1y = 35 COLUP0 = var2 COLUP1 = var2 var1 = var1 + 1 return changesprites1 player0: %11101110 %10001010 %11101110 %00101000 %11100110 %00000000 %11100111 %10010101 %10010101 %11100000 %00000000 %01001010 %01001010 %01001110 %01001000 %11101000 end player1: %01100100 %10101010 %10101010 %10101010 %01100100 %00000011 %01110100 %01010111 %01110101 %00010010 %00000000 %11010100 %10100100 %11101110 %00000100 %00000000 end var3 = 2 return changesprites2 player0: %10001000 %10001000 %10001110 %11100000 %10100000 %11100000 %00000000 %11111011 %10101010 %10101011 %10101000 %00000000 %11101010 %10101010 %10101110 %10100000 end player1: %01100111 %10000101 %11100111 %10010001 %01100001 %00000000 %00000000 %10100100 %10100100 %01110111 %00100000 %00000000 %11101000 %10101000 %11101110 %00100000 end var3 = 4 return titlehold player0x = 75 player0y = 35 player1x = 83 player1y = 35 COLUP0 = $0A COLUP1 = $0A if joy0fire = 1 then var0 = 2 return Thanks