Loaded4Bear: 2 Player Deathmatch (for 48 Hour "Global Game Jam")

+kisrael · January 26, 2015

For this weekend's "Global Game Jam" my team and I decided to make an original Atari game --

(one of the "diversifier" challengers was making something that could run on an old school platform)

http://alienbill.com/loaded4bear/ -- includes a gameplay movie.

I'm pretty pleased with the result! I used batari BASIC - I used to be active in the community early on and was delighted to see the level of support it still has (and could have saved myself a lot of toil if I had it around when I made JoustPong/FlapPing in 2004).

We kind of grew the game organically - I started merging some old music player (we had an awesome musician on the team who really embraced the platform) with some old sprite onscreen code, then put in a second player, then playfield weirdness (love that PF scrolling) and then some shooting.... we ended up with a very frenetic game, but one I think is a lot of fun... bullets move as fast as the players - when you fire, you're frozen in place (and thus vulnerable) but you have full control over the bullet! (You also lose your camouflage coloring) You can wrap around the screen for sneak attacks, and the foreground is constantly moving in response to the players.

(I'm half tempted to make a sequel or update with a one player mode... making a simple AI would be a challenge, but the game is so frantic it might be do-able.)