New Intellivision Game - RobotFindsKitten

[Zendocon]

And now, as a free gift to the Intellivision development community, I bring you - RobotFindsKitten.

 

It's as good as finished. The documentation is included. Enjoy!

 

RobotFindsKitten.zip

[catsfolly]

This is without a doubt the best kitten finding game I have ever played in my life.

 

I was impressed by all the different descriptions of the objects in the game.

 

However, I suspect that you have not taken full advantage of the graphic capabilities of the Intellivision.

 

Also, I think the best video games have an element of conflict to them (e.g. I have to get under the Invaders to shoot them, but if I do, they can shoot me).

 

I felt completely unconflicted while playing this game.

 

Some people will ask you to add a snow level or more bacon, but don't let them cloud your artistic vision!

 

Thanks for posting this.

 

Catsfolly

[decle]

Surreal, in a very good way

[+DZ-Jay]

It won't run in my emulator...

[+DZ-Jay]

This is without a doubt the best kitten finding game I have ever played in my life.

 

I was impressed by all the different descriptions of the objects in the game.

 

However, I suspect that you have not taken full advantage of the graphic capabilities of the Intellivision.

 

Also, I think the best video games have an element of conflict to them (e.g. I have to get under the Invaders to shoot them, but if I do, they can shoot me).

 

I felt completely unconflicted while playing this game.

 

Some people will ask you to add a snow level or more bacon, but don't let them cloud your artistic vision!

 

Thanks for posting this.

 

Catsfolly

 

What do you mean? Snow levels and bacon are the epitome of artistic vision!

[+DZ-Jay]

It won't run in my emulator...

 

 

Nonetheless, I played it on the web site. Cute game and I can see how it might have been very clever as a CLI console game back in the day, or to play on a calculator during a boring history class. However, judging by the Intellivision screenshots in the documentation, I see that the game-play could be severely restricted by the reduced play-field area. The challenge of hunting down Kitten through a large sea of "non-Kitten things" is gravely reduced. Plus the big, chunky characters make it look a bit "Fisher-Price-y".

 

All that said, I can imagine this game having greater appeal if it were converted to take advantage of the Intellivision's capabilities, rather than to maintain its source purity. That means animated sprites (smaller, of course), with unobtrusive pop-up messages rather than reserving valuable play-field area. Also, sound and animation effects, and a bit more of a game-y mechanic to give the player some sort of challenge.

 

-dZ.

 

 

P.S. By the way, have you tried IntyBASIC? It makes creating games like this one rather trivial, and it opens up the capabilities of the console to explore more sophisticated mechanisms, as well as graphics and sound elements.

[Zendocon]

1. Which emulator were you using that didn't run this game?

 

2. Yeah, I wanted to keep it true to the original, although the original has no sound whatsoever. Just adding music and multiplayer support I felt was blasphemous enough. Writing it as it is gives it a greater chance of getting immortalized on robotfindskitten.org.

 

3. I only started to tinker with IntyBASIC. So far I tweaked the sample music program and changed the music. I posted the result in another thread. But I had already started on this idea several years ago only to abandon it and come back to it just now. So it's running large chunks of legacy code.

[Zendocon]

This is without a doubt the best kitten finding game I have ever played in my life.

 

I was impressed by all the different descriptions of the objects in the game.

 

However, I suspect that you have not taken full advantage of the graphic capabilities of the Intellivision.

 

Also, I think the best video games have an element of conflict to them (e.g. I have to get under the Invaders to shoot them, but if I do, they can shoot me).

 

I felt completely unconflicted while playing this game.

 

Some people will ask you to add a snow level or more bacon, but don't let them cloud your artistic vision!

 

Thanks for posting this.

 

Catsfolly

Bear in mind, RobotFindsKitten was intended to be a Zen simulation, and therefore there was no intention of an element of conflict. That's why I chose to add multiplayer support to make it more like a competitive party game. That and the feature to reshuffle the position of kitten every so often.

[+DZ-Jay]

1. Which emulator were you using that didn't run this game?

 

jzIntv. I suspect I have set it to use the "miniexec" and "minigrom" instead of the actual original ones. I'll take a look.

 

2. Yeah, I wanted to keep it true to the original, although the original has no sound whatsoever. Just adding music and multiplayer support I felt was blasphemous enough. Writing it as it is gives it a greater chance of getting immortalized on robotfindskitten.org.

 

Understood.

 

3. I only started to tinker with IntyBASIC. So far I tweaked the sample music program and changed the music. I posted the result in another thread. But I had already started on this idea several years ago only to abandon it and come back to it just now. So it's running large chunks of legacy code.

 

No worries. I don't use IntyBASIC myself (preferring to use my own assembly language framework), but I know that it is very versatile and makes simple games like this one so easy to make it's almost criminal!

 

I just thought that you could try your hand at making games like Same Game & Robots, Blix, or Robot Finds Kitten in IntyBASIC with much more flair and a lot less effort, using IntyBASIC.

 

-dZ.

[carlsson]

I understand what DZ-Jay writes about pop-ups instead of having 25% of the screen assigned for messages.

 

The Maemo 5 port appears to have a such pop-up at the middle of its screen: http://rfk.garage.maemo.org/

The TI-83/84 port instead scrolls messages on a single line at the bottom of the screen: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/421/42120.html

The TI-86 port however is more alike your Intellivision port, with a small play area and a big text window: http://zem.fi/rfk86/screens.html

 

Perhaps you don't have to think more on the matter, if you're satisfied with the port, but obviously different developers solved the issue in different ways on systems with low vertical resolution.

[Zendocon]

I understand what DZ-Jay writes about pop-ups instead of having 25% of the screen assigned for messages.

 

The Maemo 5 port appears to have a such pop-up at the middle of its screen: http://rfk.garage.maemo.org/

The TI-83/84 port instead scrolls messages on a single line at the bottom of the screen: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/421/42120.html

The TI-86 port however is more alike your Intellivision port, with a small play area and a big text window: http://zem.fi/rfk86/screens.html

 

Perhaps you don't have to think more on the matter, if you're satisfied with the port, but obviously different developers solved the issue in different ways on systems with low vertical resolution.

Ah yes, the single-line solution. I could take my marquee code from FUBAR and use that.

 

I didn't like the pop-up idea, because I felt it was a distraction from the actual gameplay, all the more so with multiplayer action.

 

Originally, I was going to develop a mini-font and use 40 characters of GRAM to maintain only 2 rows and use that space as a sort of writing tablet. Back when ROM space was limited to 16K, I was also going to Huffman-encode all the text. I'll leave those ideas to the more adventurous programmers.

 

Right now, my immediate concern is coming up with enough object descriptions to fill up the 16K of upper memory that I'm using, and then I'll constrain my music to the last 4K at $Fxxx. Any takers?

[carlsson]

Dunno. I saw some port that had combined the messages from the original (?) DOS version, with Nethack fortunes! I don't know how well that works out in this game, or if there are other extended sources of objects and descriptions you should include.

[catsfolly]

Bear in mind, RobotFindsKitten was intended to be a Zen simulation, and therefore there was no intention of an element of conflict. That's why I chose to add multiplayer support to make it more like a competitive party game. That and the feature to reshuffle the position of kitten every so often.

Oops. Sorry, I didn't read the documentation. I didn't realize it was an iconic multiplatform zen simulation, so I just evaluated it by normal video game standards.

 

As an English teacher in Japan, I sometimes play a similar game with my preschool students. We practice some vocabulary cards, and then I scatter the cards around the room and tell them to "find the Cat", "find the rabbit", "find the lion" etc. So they race around the room turning over each card until they find the right ones (there are no text descriptions though...).

Edited November 19, 2016 by catsfolly

[Zendocon]

Oops. Sorry, I didn't read the documentation. I didn't realize it was an iconic multiplatform zen simulation, so I just evaluated it by normal video game standards.

 

 

 

As an English teacher in Japan, I sometimes play a similar game with my preschool students. We practice some vocabulary cards, and then I scatter the cards around the room and tell them to "find the Cat", "find the rabbit", "find the lion" etc. So they race around the room turning over each card until they find the right ones (there are no text descriptions though...).

Yeah. As a game designer, I'm interested in projects that challenge the traditional molds of what a game is by definition, or what elements it should have. I'd like to see more "interactive art" games myself.

 

I like things like whatyou described, that engage the class. I taught Sunday School many years ago, and put my game design skills to pretty good use there, integrating games into the various topics.

Edited November 19, 2016 by Zendocon

[catsfolly]

Yeah. As a game designer, I'm interested in projects that challenge the traditional molds of what a game is by definition, or what elements it should have. I'd like to see more "interactive art" games myself.

 

I like things like whatyou described, that engage the class. I taught Sunday School many years ago, and put my game design skills to pretty good use there, integrating games into the various topics.

It must have been a fun class!

 

Years ago I made a "software toy" for the Intellivision called "Press 8". The player makes "8's" appear on the screen, or blows up the 8's that are already there.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/219376-press-8-software-toy/

 

Catsfolly

[Zendocon]

Here's an updated release. I didn't implement any of the suggested methods to increase the playfield size, but I did fix a bug in the robot movement code, and I added as many nonkitten descriptions as I could fit into upper memory. Enjoy.

RobotFindsKitten v2.zip

[Gernot]

i didn't found a kitten,

but the kitten found me!

thanks for the effort.

[+nanochess]

I've made a small video of the game

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV7g2emQNtw