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Plumb Luck


SmittyB

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Surprise release! Plumb Luck is a side project I've been working on that I've just happened to finish first because of its simplicity. The difficulty is not particularly well balanced, there's no audio at the moment, and I want to randomise the start / end tile locations at some point as well as add obstacle tiles.

 

You initially get 30 seconds before slime starts running through the pipes but a second is deducted for each stage down to a minimum of 5 seconds.

You can freely place tiles over any other tile as long as the slime has not yet reached it.

Enjoy.

 

Controls:

Directions = Move cursor

Button 1 = Speeds up cursor and starts game

Button 2 = Place the left-most tile in the 'Next' queue at the current cursor location

Pause = Pauses (as one might expect)

Select = Skip the delay before slime starts coming out of the pipes, hold to speed up the slime and release to resume normal speed

 

HUD:

Hi-Score = Your highest score so far (scores are not saved when the console is turned off)

Score = Your current score this game up to a maximum of 9999

Next = The next four tiles you can place in order from left to right

Stage = The number of X marks indicate the number of stages you have completed up to 20

 

Scoring:

Slime moves through an additional pipe section = 1 point

The stage is complete and the Slime runs down the drain = 10 points

 

 

~~Edit~~

As of the 2nd July release you now get 0 points completion bonus for 'Simple' mode, 10 points for 'Normal' mode, and 20 points for 'Expert' mode.

post-27819-0-83106900-1497043635_thumb.png

post-27819-0-57476200-1497043642_thumb.png

PlumbLuck.a78

PlumbLuck.bin

post-27819-0-71027800-1499018263_thumb.png

PlumbLuck_02_07_17.a78

PlumbLuck_02_07_17.bin

Edited by SmittyB
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I noticed that after 3 or 4 boards the display messes up. Maybe there's an unmatched gosub/return?

 

I've tried playing through 6 stages and I haven't seen anything wrong. I've double checked my program flow which looks okay. The only things that don't have returns are the game over and win states but I'm jumping directly to these with goto and never from within a subroutine. I've also checked to see if I'm accidentally redrawing something over and over but this too looks okay.

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You initially get 30 seconds before slime starts running through the pipes...

 

great idea,but damn hard.Cannot beat just one round...

 

Perhaps a configurable difficulty setting can be added:

 

60 seconds = Novice 120 seconds = Novice

45 seconds = Standard OR 90 seconds = Standard

30 seconds = Advance 60 seconds = Advance

15 seconds = Expert 30 seconds = Expert

 

If considered, maybe a different color slime can represent each difficulty setting as well:

 

Novice = Blue ($97) or Aqua ($AA)

Standard = Red ($33) or Pink ($47)

Advance = Green ($D7) aka current default

Expert = Yellow ($1C) or Orange ($27)

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SmittyB, I was also thinking that you could use separate commands to plot the 6-character strip on the right side, and/or the 1 character margins. That way you could assign them separate palettes, and make the whole thing a bit more colorful.

 

 

Hi Smitty

 

great idea,but damn hard.Cannot beat just one round.I prefer the Dungeon Game :)

 

greetings Walter

You can overwrite a tile by just tapping the fire button until you get the one you want. This makes it a bit easier. I did finish once or twice, but I agree it's tough.

 

I also like the idea of there being board after board, and the difficulty increases. :thumbsup:

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I'll see what I can do about different difficulty settings, the difficulty is something that I've not been able to get feeling right so I'll try and give a variety of options including a sandbox mode with no time limit.

 

The whole thing is fairly heavily inspired by 'Pipe Dream', the version of 'Pipe Mania' that was part of the old Windows entertainment packs which is why there's the fairly bland green / grey colour scheme but I think maybe it could do with a bit more colour here and there.

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I've tried playing through 6 stages and I haven't seen anything wrong. I've double checked my program flow which looks okay. The only things that don't have returns are the game over and win states but I'm jumping directly to these with goto and never from within a subroutine. I've also checked to see if I'm accidentally redrawing something over and over but this too looks okay.

I can still recreate this in mame, after repeating this about ~5 times: press the joystick button to start a game, do nothing and die. After 5 times, In the mame debugger I also detected it's trying to write to other registers above the palettes, in rounds before the palette gets messed up.

 

It seems to be getting messed up during the plotchars routine, though possibly that's plotmap calling plotchars. Any chance you have a plotchar/plotmap with a y value larger than the number of character rows on the screen?

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That's quite possible. I'll have to look into that tomorrow.

I've been playing around with the times and I've been able to have a good game by setting the delay to 30 seconds but halving the speed of the slime. That way it'll appear before you likely finish your layout but you'll have time to add things in front of it.

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I've fixed that bug. It was down to a combination of an unnecessary call to my plotScreen subroutine and a leftover call to plotchars. I completely forgot that plotchars uses line numbers for the y position so when I changed my first version that had the next tile on line 0 I gave it a bad value then never removed it because I replaced the way the next tiles are drawn.

 

My plotScreen routine then used plotchars every time the game moved from the title screen to a stage.

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New version.

 

I'm now happy with the overall difficulty with the timer being 30 seconds but with the slime speed halved.

 

On the menu you can now select a difficulty with up and down on the joystick. I've been playing around with a few things so each difficulty has its own palette but these will change.

 

Sandbox = A blank stage with no timer, you need to hit the select button to start the slime

Simple = A single basic stage that never changes

Normal / Expert = Both of these are the same at the moment and they will currently play through a small selection of challenging stages. It is possible to beat them as shown in the screenshot.

post-27819-0-02941400-1497387648_thumb.png

plumbluck.bas.a78

plumbluck.bas.bin

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  • 3 weeks later...

New release, this time with 20 different maps and some basic sound effects.

 

The Sandbox mode still gives you an empty map with no time limit to play around with

Simple, Normal, and Export cycle through 20 maps with the 20th being a bonus '!' map that's already completed, just to give you free points.

Simple mode give you a 60 second slime delay and no points bonus for completing a map

Normal mode gives you a 30 second slime delay and a 10 point bonus for completing each map

Expert mode give you a 30 second slime delay and a 20 point bonus but the slime flows twice as fast once it appears.

 

I've tested the maps and have completed them on Expert mode (and got a score of 874).

 

I don't intend to update this further as it was always a side project to my dungeon crawler and I don't want this to become a big distraction so please enjoy.

Maybe I'll make an improved version in the future if there are things that definitely need changing.

PlumbLuck_02_07_17.a78

PlumbLuck_02_07_17.bin

post-27819-0-25158600-1499018902_thumb.png

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Aaaaaaand....your latest version was posted seconds after I posted that response. :)

 

Still...it would be nice to have more contrast between the floor and the pipes. Hard to tell where the tiles are versus the pipes.

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  • 3 years later...

Thanks very much.

I do consider this version 'finished' as it was just a small project to avoid burning out on Spire of the Ancients so early and besides extra levels there's not much I can do with it, but I intend to start over one day using all I've learned since. Like a 'Plumb Luck DX'.

 

I actually learnt recently that there was an arcade version of Pipe Mania that does the same with having to reach a drain tile, so while Plumb Luck might not be as original a spin on the idea I thought it was, I have something I can compare it to when I come to remake it.

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