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Piggles

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  1. Piggles

    maze of moving rooms...

    By Piggles,

    ...filled with traps and foes. Current half-project of mine. Not worth forum posting yet, because it's still far from a half-way enjoyable demo. Attached is the bin and the code. As of now, I want to remove the pit trap, because it's an HP based game, so a final death like a pit might not be such a good idea. On the other hand, it is the easiest to avoid (so far), so maybe it should kill you. Only two traps so far. Laser and pit. There is an escape hatch in one room. Eventually, you will need to find a key to open it. If you run to the right at the beginning, you'll encounter the pit and then the laser.
     
    Now that I've got the hang of making rooms move, I would like to make it a 5x5 maze, rather than 4x4. 4x4 is kind of cramped. Reducing the HP of the player would make space less of an issue, but I think the game should take more than one or two minutes to play. So, I think, more hp, and higher damage from attacks.
  3. Piggles

    Use a Notebook and pencil

    By Piggles,

    I got back into coding after porting "Castle" from David Ahl's Creative Computing magazine to QuiteBasic. An excellent classic BASIC interpreter written in Javascript. Here's my game: Castle
     
    Something I learned, at least for me, is that I can't code directly to the computer from scratch. I need a notebook. I need to be away from the computer, where there's no pressure to achieve a great deal and have a working program right off the bat. I got familiar with QuiteBasic, wrote a few simple programs to learn the syntax, and then I went to the notebook. I printed the syntax reference and used that as my guide. I spent a few weeks of lunch breaks working on it. Time at the doctor's waiting room, oil change waiting room, etc. It was rather fun. And productive. I found it easy to discard bad code and keep good code.
     
    So the itch to create an atari game bit me again. I did not want to replay the damned Zombies debacle. You fine folks have made better adventure games since then. So I'm back to the notebook. I didn't print the Batari Basic manual, and so I did a little, and then sat down to code it. Tossed it. Tried again. Not so bad this time.
     
    I initially envisioned a "ambient game" like Knytt but with a honey bee going around collecting rare flowers and encountering various creatures as part of the scenery. Worms, spiders, frogs, etc. Then I thought maybe a shorter, fetch-the-treasure game with a couple predators that hound you as you look for rare nectar from various flowers. I need to flush this out a bit before I continue. However, I'd like to make the code and bin available if you feel like you want to mess with it or use it for inspiration.
     
    Use the trigger as you approach a flower to land on it. I envision a sucking sound and a score increase, but not sure. It just seemed right. The cyclescore indicated 2112 when I ran an early version, as you can see in the attachment. An excellent Rush album is a positive sign. Later, it indicated 1984, so I don't know if a classic Orwell novel is a good sign or not. This is all in humor, but I couldn't help but find it funny enough to take a picture.
     
    There's a lot of opportunity to use various color schemes for terrain. I considered a wasp that chases you and drags you back to it's hive. Maybe a joystick jiggle routine to escape. Maybe a frog that leaps back and forth and tries to eat you if you get too close to the lily pads.
     
    Enough rambling!
  4. Piggles
    I had a problem for a while figuring out what to do about making my flickering sprites collide properly. Using odd frame, even frame, I found that only sprites on the same frame could collide. So I varied my flickering with one sprite alternating frames, and the other doing two frames in a row. Attached is the code and a binary. You drive sprites A and B. C and D will wrap around the vertical edges. If you touch C or D, one of your sprites will die and turn into a skull, the other will keep moving. The reset switch resets the program. Flickered sprites look horrible, but at least now I have two p0s and p1s that'll crash into each other.
     
    altflick.bas
     
    altflick.bas.bin
  5. Piggles

    mopey dopey

    By Piggles,

    I drew a tall character with visual bb the other day, looking for inspiration. It's easy to be inspired, hard to do anything with it. Anyway, I put him/her/it up for sharing, maybe it'll inspire someone else. The code is public domain.
  6. Piggles

    1k Javascript programs

    By Piggles,

    I stumbled upon this site one day when I was trying to find minimalist game design contests.
     
    http://js1k.com/
     
    Javascript programs with <= 1K of code. Some with amazing graphics and the few games some have decent gameplay. One even plays Spider Solitaire. Another is a gravity game where you fire a rocket from one planet, and try to land it on another using gravity of the various bodies to guide it.
     
    Now the data on many of these exceeds 1K. So it's not CODE + DATA <=1024 but still, some really amazing stuff. I can't help but try to share this find with you.
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