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So... back to one of the things on my "To-do" list - namely, "Stupid Game Ideas". (Pretend that was said in a loud, booming voice with lots of echo.) ...ideas... ...ideas... ...ideas... These are the games I would make for the Atari 2600, if I had any clue about programming. And trust me... I don't. I've read through a bunch of the 2600 "how-to" stuff, and even though I kind-of get some of the limitations of the 2600, and have a vague sense of what the hardware is doing, I have no knowledge of actual programming whatsoever. Even batari Basic can't help me, since, of course, that requires knowledge of BASIC. I haven't had a class in BASIC since 1979 or '80, and then I just used it to make pictures and simple animation, rather than actual "programs". Funny how some things never change. So, I have all of these pent-up ideas for 2600 games, and I figured I'd post them here, rather than cluttering up the homebrew forum with them. Not that I'm saying people do that, mind you. Anyway, the first game I was thinking of posting about was an original* idea I came up with 25 years ago. But I think I'll warm up on an arcade port, first. *Original meaning completely derivative of other games, but with minor gameplay additions and changes. So here then, are rough mockups for... Bosconian! First, the arcade screenshots: Then the 2600 mockups: I wanted to keep the "space-turd" look of the original asteroids. The space stations would almost certainly need to be made out of the playfield, but that brings up a question... can you actually scroll the playfield in 8 directions? Yikes. Another big problem with Bosconian is not only do you have to scroll the playfield around, but as you shoot pods off of the space stations (or completely blow it up), the playfield has to change in smaller chunks. Same thing (ideally) when the middle of the station opens to shoot a missile: I did, however, come up with a possible solution for the radar screen. Now, usually in 2600 ports, they stick it at the bottom of the screen so it can be its own flicker-fest, separate from the game area. But I think you could actually lose the radar - mostly. At the beginning of each wave, the layout of the stations could be shown on a separate screen, so you at least got an idea of which way to go. Then, on the main screen, there would be a flashing green indicator (playfield again?) along the border of the screen, that would lead you in the direction of the next nearest space station: Anytime there was a space station onscreen, the indicator would go away. The full radar screen could also be brought up with either player 2's fire button, or a console switch. While not really necessary, it wouldn't be a bad idea. Of course, this effectively loses the radar screen for tracking enemies, but it keeps the basic gameplay intact. There are other problems, too. Besides the whole scrolling playfield thing, is the fact that there tends to be a lot of enemies (and their shots) onscreen. Plus, the player's ship shoots both fore and aft at the same time (this is one of the things that makes Bosconian unique, so it would be a "must have"). And then, there's putting the score someplace. Minor detail. But just think how cool it would be to have the AtariVox shout, "Blast off!" at the beginning of the game. Well, that's it for Bosconian (I didn't see much point in mocking up the title screen). So next time, maybe I'll post one of my original ideas. And if I can get this posted in the next six minutes, I'll have made my "seven in a row", too.
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Finally! After a few very frantic weeks, I've managed to all-but wrap up a bunch of projects. The semester at work is ending this Friday, and I taught my last class Monday. Of course, when January rolls around, I get to start it all over again. The manuals for Space Battle, Phantom II/Pirate and the AtariVox are basically finished, and are just going through final proof-reading now. And yes, since they're already on sale, that's probably a good thing. The sprites for Toyshop Trouble are, as far as I know, all wrapped up as well. I didn't have to design anywhere nearly as many as I did for Reindeer Rescue, but these are all in full color. So it was fun to be able to really push the look of them to a (hopefully) really polished level. The development for Toyshop Trouble was an interesting process, to be sure. Last year, it was just basically Bob doing the programming, and me handling whatever he needed graphics-wise. This year, there were programmers all over the place. John Payson (supercat) emerged as the main programmer for the project, but there were certainly a lot of others contributing ideas, code, feedback, optimization, title graphics and... well... some extra stuff, too. Hopefully, they'll get due credit and post some stuff in their blogs about their work on the game. In the end, (and truth be told... it's not quite the end yet) Toyshop Trouble turned out pretty cool. It's a very unique title for the 2600, and feels a little bit like Food Fight, at least to me (which is a good thing). It's pretty amazing how fast the game came together, although I'm thinking Albert really needs to start on this in October next year. Incidentally, I'm really glad to see Reindeer Rescue back in the store this year. It's nice that, after all the hard work Bob put into the game, more people will get to enjoy it. I'm kind of hoping it will show back up on the top sellers list, too. Last year it hit #2, and hopefully, all of those sales will still count towards its total. Anyway, as I was playing around with my AtariVox, in prelude to working on the manual of course, I was really struck by the coolness of having voice synthesis on the 2600. It's especially cool in Man Goes Down (which I loaded up via my Krokodile Cart), and makes me hope all the more that Alex Herbert returns to health and is able to finish the game someday. So that brought me back to one of the things on my "To-Do" list... coming up with Stupid Game Ideas. (The first one being Bosconian - which actually looks to be a fairly popular idea.) This time though, I thought... "You know what I'd really like to have for the AtariVox? A cartridge that lets me make it say stuff." Using either the keyboard controllers or a joystick, you would type (or select) letters on screen, and form words and sentences, then have the AtariVox spit it out. I think this would be the perfect companion to sell with the AtariVox, and would provide people with hours of mindless entertainment, as they got their 2600s to speak all sorts of funny, stupid, or vile things. It would be great for creating answering machine messages too, depending on how long of a string of words it could put together. Plus - since the AtariVox has memory in it - you could potentially store your favorite phrases in it. You should also be able to control pitch and speed as well. Ideally, on a word-by-word basis if possible, so you could make the AtariVox sing, too. There would need to be some provision for odd letter combinations (sh, tion, augh, ough), or an included phonetic pronunciation guide, so people would know what to type in order to get the results they wanted. And the name of this cartridge? Well, it could only be one thing, of course... "Shut up!"
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After reading Mezrabad's review of Human Cannonball, and the subsequent comments about the classic game Artillery, I remembered a graphical hack I did of Kirk Crawford's version of Artillery for the Mac. I created this back around 1990. Re-titled "Spit into the wind", it featured two caricatures of my college profs hocking loogies at each other. So I thought, "Hey! This is another (fanfare please)... Stupid Game Idea!" It would be a natural for the 2600. While there's already an Artillery-type game in perpetual homebrew development, as well as Xonox's Artillery Duel, I'm unaware of any 2600 game in which you spit at each other! As a little background, the two profs were design teachers at an art college I went to. I won't reveal their real names, but we called them Ramblin' Ray, and Butt-Ug Lee. Here are a couple of caricatures I drew of them back-in-the-day. Ray: Butt-Ug: (In case you're wondering, he tended to flail his arm around a lot and grab his butt.) The irony isn't lost on me, that as I'm teaching college now, probably every last one of my students is similarly caricaturing me. (One of the hazards of working in the Character Animation department.) Well, what goes around comes around. Anyway, after a little digging, I actually found "Spit into the Wind". (Some days it's good to be a pack-rat.) It doesn't completely work though, now. When I click to change the angle and amount of Cheetos™ (formerly gunpowder), the numbers just jump from minimum to maximum. (The newer version on Kirk's site does work properly under OS X's Classic, however. It just doesn't have the modified graphics.) I'd completely forgotten that I'd also hacked the bird into a little flying version of Ray. Here's the application icon, of Ray getting hit in the face: To do those graphics on the 2600 though, I'd have to use both sprites for each character to get reasonable detail. Although as long as they were kept vertically separated, it should work okay. The basic premise is simple. You have these two guys, facing each other, with some terrain in between them. There's a wind blowing (of course), and you have to determine how many Cheetos™ they need, and at what angle they need to spit, in order to hit the other guy. Once the parameters are set, you hit "Fire" and they both shoot at the same time. If they both miss, you adjust, and fire again. One nice feature of Artillery (which probably can't be duplicated on the 2600) was that the trajectory for each shot was shown as an arc on screen, and was left in place so you could see how much each shot got changed. Still, I think it'd be a pretty fun game even without that. And it'd be a blast to do the manual for it. Edit: Well, I decided to see what a mockup of this might look like. Now first, I'm not sure an asymmetrical playfield can be done the way I'd like it to. But the big problem I ran into was, well... big. The sprites were way too big. You couldn't not hit them... So that meant I had to at least try to make the sprites smaller. Much smaller. I wasn't sure I could come up with 8-pixel-wide versions of these guys, but I think they turned out pretty well... This also has the handy side-effect of not needing to keep the sprites vertically separated anymore. With that solved, I continued mocking up the rest of the elements... It'd be nice for each player to be able to enter a three-letter name for themselves. Their scores would be at the top. At the bottom is the amount of Cheetos™ per shot, the angle they spit at, and the wind speed and direction. The diagonal lines represent the angle at which they'll shoot. Basically, an "aimer". Once they shoot, the aimer disappears, and their shots follow a parabolic arc. Ideally, the terrain would be randomly generated each round, but provide platforms wide enough for each sprite to stand on (or alternately, just store a bunch of pre-designed ones). One thing I don't care for in either Artillery Duel or Incoming!, is that the sprites can just kind of hang out over the playfield. Joystick controls couldn't be simpler: up/down for Cheetos™, left/right for angle, and fire locks it in. When both players have pressed fire, the spitting begins! In a one-player game, the computer controls the other character (but you get to choose). Now all we need is a big bag of Cheetos™! And a programmer. (Could make a nice mini-game compo entry. )
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So here's the dillyo (word up)... Since several of you regular readers (yes, you) just so happen to be 2600 programmers (who, I might add, are some of the most talented, creative, and staggeringly intelligent people on the face of the planet), I thought I'd ask for some programming help. And I figured it would be more appropriate to do it here, than clutter up the homebrew forums. Now, by "help" I actually mean "do (most of) the programming for me". But I figured you already saw that coming - what with the staggering intelligence and all. I'm not operating under any delusions here of programming something entirely by myself. But, the goal of this little endeavor is to actually try and help programmers, by doing some drudge work for them (you). Specifically, for the AtariVox. My understanding of this little box is, that it takes quite a bit of trial-and-error to come up with decent sounding voices for it. And I'd like to see more homebrew games use it. It's a cool piece of gear. So I'd like to take a shot at doing some of that trial and error. I've downloaded the AtariVox Programming Guide, the SpeakJet User Manual, and the PhraseALator Dictionary, and have a reasonable understanding of what you need to enter in as far as the voice data goes. What I need, is a template. Basically, a simple chunk of code (if there is such a thing) where I can just drop in the appropriate lines of code to create voices (and other AtariVox sounds), so I can then build a working binary, and load it into my Krokodile Cart, and test them. Then go back, modify and refine them, and eventually pass the results on to homebrew authors to use in their games. Think of it as audible sprite drawing. If anyone's interested (or even thinks this is a workable idea) let me know. For that matter, if it's not a workable idea, you should let me know that, too.
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(I went back in and edited this blog entry, since I found that the information I was asking for in the first place, was right in front of me the whole time. Serves me right for not doing a little more research before posting this blog entry. ) One of my still-unfinished projects is to create a set of 2600 sound samples for use with Apple's GarageBand. Thanks to this handy web page, I now know how to do just that. The trick is, having the 2600 spit out as the correct* notes, so I can assign them to the right keys. Tommy's java app gives a list of 2600 sounds and corresponding notes. You can also tell it to restrict the list to notes that are only a given amount out of tune. Very handy. That, coupled with SoundX, should let me record a select range of notes needed for the samples. In the end, I'm hoping to end up with a GarageBand version of Tommy's 2600 Music Utility. The only downside, is that GarageBand won't actually spit out any data useful for programming the 2600 (unless there's a way to convert the project files). But it would still be fun to play with. We'll see how all this works very shortly. I'll be using a modded 2600 to record the sounds - not an emulator. It's a little more work to set up, but it will be more accurate. * "correct" being a relative term when applied to the 2600's ability to generate anything resembling a note
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I've been playing Incoming! lately, and it's brought back to mind one of my Stupid Game Ideas!™, namely Spit into the Wind! - which is basically Artillery, with Cheetos. One of the things I didn't have in the original mock-ups, was a feature I mentioned that I really liked from Artillery, which is that it would leave a trail behind when it fired a shot, so you could see the trajectory. I figured it probably couldn't be done on the 2600, but then as I was thinking about the game again recently, I think I came up with a solution. The missile for each character could (maybe?) be used to draw the arc. The trick would be drawing each half of the arc, every other scanline. For example, the left halves of the arcs would be on even scanlines, the right halves on odd scanlines. This way, you'd never have two copies of the same missile on any given scanline. So the results would look something like this: Not sure if it would be possible to actually make that work in a game or not, but the Color Bar cart is apparently doing something similar in order to draw circles on the screen. Of course, that's not actually a game. The difference with this and Artillery, is that even if this could work, you almost certainly couldn't leave multiple trajectories on screen. Maybe you could have two for each player if you drew each half-arc using every fourth scanline instead: But I'm thinking strictly in terms of graphics here, and not all of the calculations actually required to make this stuff happen, so it may not be possible anyway. Anyway, I thought I'd throw this out there, just for kicks.
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I've been spending about the last week and a half going through my stuff. You know the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Everybody has some of it. Cardboard boxes, with stuff in them, jammed into the back of a closet or attic somewhere. Stuff that you haven't looked at in years. Years and years. In some cases... decades. (An aside: the fact that I'm measuring what I consider to be relatively recent events as having passed in "decades" bothers me.) I didn't think I'd really accumulated that much stuff. After all, my apartment isn't really cluttered. (Certainly not in the way my office at work is.) Most of my stuff has been in boxes, in a couple of closets. But I decided it was time to go through the stuff, find out what was in there, and throw out the stuff that I didn't want to keep anymore. I have thrown out a lot of stuff. I've also recycled stuff, shredded stuff, and put some stuff in a pile to take over to Goodwill. It really surprised me how much stuff I had. But now, I have less stuff. A lot less. It was hard getting rid of some of the stuff at first, but after awhile (and the first dozen boxes) it became a lot easier. And the stuff I have now is stuff I want to keep, at least for now. I also know where it is, and can get to it easier, since I sorted it, labeled it, and stuck the stuff into big plastic bins that I can see into, and stack much easier than cardboard boxes. And as a nice side-effect... I have closets again! Usable ones. Anyway, what's been interesting is revisiting various periods of my life. From Jr. High School through the present. Through three colleges, several jobs, tons of art classes, a move to California, various relationships, and on and on. One thing that kept coming up, over and over, is drawing. I've been drawing basically my whole life. I can see different phases I went through as an artist, different interests, improvements, experiments (many failed ones), and stuff that I drew decades (yes... decades) ago, that I still remember to this day. This is one of those drawings: Admittedly, it's not much to look at, but I was delighted when I found it. I thought I had lost this drawing years ago, since I recall having looked for it before, to no avail. So, what's the big deal with it? Well, this is from my sole attempt at programming a game, all the way back in 1980. The game was going to be a parody of Space Invaders, called Space Cadets. The idea was to have rather silly-looking aliens dropping, well... droppings. I was just a kid at the time. Programmed in BASIC on a TRS-80 (at a Radio Shack Computer Center after school hours), I managed to get as far as making a screen full of these guys march all the way across the screen. They might have gone back, too. Not sure. I also managed (in a separate program) to get the player's ship to move back and forth. This was a huge accomplishment for me, although that's as far as it ever got. Basically (pun not intended), to get any farther would have actually required "programming skills". What I was doing, was just making some graphics animate. Sort of like a really convoluted animated GIF. Sure, you can make one that looks like a video game, but it's really not. Since then, and especially since discovering the Homebrew game scene for the 2600, Space Cadets would pop into my mind from time to time. I'd think of new ideas for it, and lament that drawing on graph paper that I'd lost which had all of the sprites on it. Now though... I've found that old drawing. And I'm thinking it's about time to really flesh-out Space Cadets as a full-fledged game... ...proposal. I still can't program, but after 26 years, I think I've got some pretty good ideas for the game. It may never get made, since I'm well-aware that the only way it will happen is if a programmer thinks it's interesting enough to spend his or her own time working on it. But at least if I finally put all of the ideas down, maybe, just maybe... this game will leave me alone and let me move onto something else!!
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