bjbest60

It’s been a long war. You are one of the last five members of the Blue Brigade. You are fighting for everything you believe is right, just, free, and true. Your enemies for the past ten years have been the treacherous Yellowcoats. They too are fighting for everything they believe is right, just, free, and true. They are wrong. In the past year, your scientists have made advances in ballistics and issued each remaining member of the Brigade a gun. “Even a chicken could shoot a Yellowcoat,” the boys the in the lab say. But the Yellowcoats operate on stealth. There are far more of them than there are of you, and they can appear from seemingly anywhere. They are superior in hand-to-hand combat, and if you come into contact with one, you are guaranteed a swift death. The Yellowcoats have a strange tradition of mourning their dead. Anytime one of them falls in battle, other Yellowcoats immediately erect a tombstone. The inscriptions are tedious and never enlightening. All the graves and their markers do is get in the way of your bullets—and you. If you defeat enough Yellowcoats, you will win the battle—but not, as of yet, the war. You will then be deployed at the next battlefield, where intel assures you that you will face an even larger and faster army of Yellowcoats. One other thing. You might have a gun. But the Yellowcoats have bombs. Right now, the science is simplistic and the bombs are difficult to set up. But as you fight increasing battles, you feel both the technology and the skill of the Yellowcoats deploying it are increasing. Should a Yellowcoat detonate a bomb, all will be destroyed: the Yellowcoat, the tombstones, the battlefield and you with it. Informally, the Yellowcoats call themselves the Omelets. They’re not worried about breaking a few eggs. Member of the Blue Brigade, you are determined to end this long war.

Hello all, I'm happy to release the beta version of my next game, Tombstones. It's an 8k game with the standard kernel. The full story is in the next post, but here's the tl;dr version: You're blue and the enemy is yellow. Shoot the enemies to kill them. Any time you do, they leave behind a tombstone which will block future enemies, you, and your shots. If you kill enough enemies, you will move to a new battlefield where you will encounter more enemies who also move faster. The counter on the lower left signifies the number of blue soldiers remaining--you begin with the player and four reserves. The enemies have a bomb which takes time to set up, and that's represented by the timer in the lower right. If the timer reaches zero, the bomb will detonate, destroying everything. To develop the game, I was thinking about the playfield, and how there are a lot of maze games that ask you to either negotiate a maze or alter it to succeed. But I feel like there aren't many games whose fundamental mechanic is to build a maze, particularly from scratch. It's fairly easy to isolate yourself from the enemy here, but that only guarantees the bomb will explode. There is an A/Expert level of difficulty. I actually prefer playing the game in that mode, so it makes me wonder if the B/Novice mode is too easy. I'd love to hear any comments, criticisms, and suggestions for improvement. I certainly would like any bug reports as well. I actually have a bit of ROM left over for improvements (about 400 bytes), and the game could expand to 16k if need be. For example, after one battle is over, there could be basic title cards showing the level number of the next battle. Hope you enjoy, and I look forward to your thoughts! Tombstones Beta 1.bin Tombstones Beta 2.bin Tombstones Beta 3.bin

Heh. I meant that I think it'd be cool if people were actually willing to risk the lives of their actual TVs and VCSes by playing this on a real setup rather than an emulator. That's why the bonus points are both extra special and fake. But with that in mind, I have active plans to turn this into an actual cart (though sadly with no digital clock, although that's an awesome idea). I've never made carts before, so it'll be a learning experience. I'll post again here if they become a reality. Thanks again, all, for (not) playing!

I've been out of town for about a week, so I didn't have a chance to watch until now. Thanks for playing the game! I appreciate the commentary and that you dedicated a fair amount of time to it. Awesome! Seems like an appropriate place for it to be. I feel like Arenafoot has pretty much mastered the game, to the extent that it can be mastered. (And congrats on 1,000+!) The strategy of moving the square to the right works well. And yes, the game is driven by sound. One beep says an item is in the room. But you can press the fire button at any time and get different sounds (and therefore different objects). The super-secret special tip: the higher the sound, the higher the points of the resulting object. The percentages are skewed towards the lower-point objects, so it can take a few presses to get a higher sound. The beeps are based on a C chord, so there are low C, low E, low G, high C, and (after hitting 100 points) high G. Anyway, again, thanks for experimenting!

Just to officially complete this one, I've uploaded the final .bin to the top post. 3 bytes left in ROM!

Grateful for this thorough and thoughtful review of SCC by Gray Defender: I've also uploaded the final, official .bin to the first post for your emulation enjoyment!

Glad you checked it out! No, I didn't try messaging you, but there may have been other people online. I agree--the interface is definitely odd, and I still wish the listing of messages on the boards worked more like modern email, for example. And yes, I have no idea where files really go either, especially if you're using the telnet client built into a webpage. It's strange (and fun) thinking about how people networked pre-Internet. Yeah, it's kind of a strange space. Some interesting older files, though. Many of them make it appear like the world came to an end sometime during the rise of Windows 95 and the Clinton administration. And I guess the world did come to an end then, more or less, for BBSes.

Cool! We actually had a power outage today due to high winds and both the laptop working as the server and my router crashed, but everything should be back online now. Let me know what you think!

I just launched a new one over the weekend: Space Cactus Canyon. Some BBSes can be accessed through a web page that have a built-in telnet client. I set up such a page right here. Just click Connect. Check it out if you're so inclined!

Right now, it's Telnet only. The laptop on which it runs does have an on-board modem, but right now I don't have a dedicated phone line for it. I'd like to look into dial-up, though.

Hello everyone, I just wanted to announce that over the weekend I launched a new BBS titled after my Atari 2600 homebrew, Space Cactus Canyon. You can use your favorite telnet client to access it at spacecactus.sytes.net, or, in the (extremely unlikely, I'm sure) event you don't have a favorite telnet client, I've set up a web page with an embedded client. It's pretty small right now, but I've done some customization in terms of graphics and forums. As for files, it has some of my favorite DOS games available for download, as well as some Atari 2600 ROM files--official releases and homebrews. I've never run a BBS before, and this was kind of a "because it's there" type of project. It seems most people run them either a.) out of nostalgia or a desire to keep things old-school or b.) from a libertarian, away-from-prying-eyes perspective. I'm wondering if there's something that BBSes could do today that the modern Internet can't. I don't know if there's an answer for that, but it could be very interesting if there's a service that a BBS could provide that's not really available elsewhere. Anyway, check it out if you're inclined, and let me know what you think! And I'd love to hear other ideas about what a modern BBS might accomplish.

Awesome. That first link has a high-quality scan of one of their disks, and that's exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks! I still can't find a good scan of a catalog anywhere, though. Does anyone have one? I'd love some photos or a scan of the cover and a few pages. I'd also love to own a physical copy, but I haven't been able to locate one for sale.

Hello all, I'm wondering if anyone has any Public Brand Software catalogs or disks available that they'd be willing to scan. PBS was a shareware distributor in the late '80s (maybe early '90s, too) and, from what I remember, sold disks at $5 each with various shareware and freeware titles. Pretty much all of my early PC games came from here. They sent out catalogs listing their wares, perhaps quarterly. The odd thing is that the info online about them is fairly thin, even though I felt like they were a pretty ubiquitous company. (Maybe it's only because I was excited to get the new catalogs in the mail.) I'd appreciate any info anyone might have, even if you don't have any physical artifacts. This forum seemed more appropriate than the "Gaming Publications" one, so my apologies if that would be a better place to ask. I'm attaching the two images I could dig up on Google. Thanks.

I love Entombed! I'm trying very hard to not make it basically a clone of that game. But I agree, that enemy could be very interesting. I would probably use one of the score bars to somehow keep track of the number of wall breaks available. I don't know if would make sense with the game overall. I like the idea of score pickups, too. I'm particularly excited about the invisible maze idea. It seems easy to program (knock on wood) and would really change how the game plays. I think it's time to kind of sit down and think about the larger flow of the game (which enemies occur when, when does Evil Otto have a duplicate copy, when should things be invisible, what's a satisfying order of mazes, etc.) and set about incorporating those ideas. Thanks!

I've uploaded a new version that includes an indestructible enemy. I think this addresses the issue of needing to move both the player and the maze. For levels 1 and 2, the enemy is an "Evil Otto" type--it just chases you. For levels 3 and above, there's an enemy that's confined to the maze itself. (It's buggy as hell, often jumping walls due to scrolling, but the idea is there.) I'm curious if one is more compelling. I'm surprised that I think Evil Otto makes for better gameplay, and I think there's enough potential variation (speed, directions that it travels, etc.) that it could suffice. I'm using the standard kernel, so I'm kind of left with the ball as my remaining graphic. That could definitely be a pickup of some sort--right now I'm thinking that if you pick it up, it gives you the power to destroy one wall (one or two pfpixels, depending on where you hit them). I definitely plan on the countdown timer, and varying player / goal positions. A temporarily invisible maze is a great idea, and I think a moving goal could work, too. I'm also going to look into using multiples copies of the enemy and also possibly the player. So, lots to consider. But for now: is one of the enemies, in theory at least, better than the other? Thanks!

Certainly! I've uploaded it to the original post. I don't really follow conventional niceties with commenting, naming, labeling, etc., but I'm hoping the variable names and section names are sufficiently clear. And yes, if someone sees some possibilities for their own games, please feel free to use whatever's helpful.

Thanks for the comments, everyone. I'm curious how automatic scrolling would work here. Would the idea be to put the player in a sort of bounding box, and if the player tries to move beyond the box, start moving the maze rather than the player? (That is, the player could move around the center of the screen, but if you wander too far to one edge, eventually you stop moving and the maze starts moving. I'm thinking about how the Mario games handle their horizontal scrolling this way.) I don't have much beyond the mechanic itself. I'm thinking it's just a different kind of puzzle game. But I'm also looking for something to add interest; I'm not sure what it is yet. Standard enemy / shooting behavior seems kind of boring, and it might be difficult to scroll enemies properly. I'm open to ideas, and I'm not quite sure where I want to go with it. I added a new .bin to the original post with the maze controls flipped (e.g., button + up = pfscroll down, rather than pfscroll up) and I wonder if that makes things less awkward. Not necessarily. It made sense to me, but I tried flipping everything, and I wonder if the controls are more intuitive now. With the new .bin above, the controls are reversed from the original, and perhaps it makes changing between moving the player and the maze more logical. Thanks again, everyone. I appreciate the thoughts so far.

Hey all, I'm attaching a prototype of an idea I'm calling Magimaze until something better comes along. You play as the morphing square thing, and your goal is to reach the star. You can move your square as expected, but--where the "magi" comes in--you can move the maze itself by holding down the fire button and using the joystick. (I say "magi," but you might pronounce it as "pfscroll." ) By moving both yourself and the maze, you can reach the goal. There are six levels so far, the sixth being nigh impossible. If you touch a wall, the level resets. My main question: has this been done before? It seems like a pretty simple concept, but I can't immediately name a game that operates in this manner. I don't really want to replicate an idea if it's clearly been done better elsewhere. But so far I like where the game is headed. Secondary question: If you think this is interesting, what could be added to make it a game beyond maze after maze after maze? I have a timer planned to get higher scores based on faster completion, but I don't think that's enough. Thanks for any comments! Magimaze prototype 012418.bin Magimaze prototype 012518 flipped controls.bin Magimaze prototype code 012618.bas Magimaze prototype 013118.bin

I've added v2 of the beta to the top post. There are two main changes: 1.) Once you hit 100 points, a new pickup gets added into the rotation, worth 11 points (not counting the multiplier) if taken. 2.) After some soul-searching, I doubled the drop rate to move the game along a bit. (Though it's still a slow burn.) I wanted to implement more ideas, but I also wanted to keep the game at 4k and I currently have 3 bytes left. It could definitely be expanded to 8k, but I'm not sure if there's anything that'd make the game sufficiently new / different to justify it. So, try the game out if you haven't! Get the high score!

Merry Christmas from Space Cactus Canyon!