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Fear of the Dark (Atari 2600)


MemberAtarian

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Hey man, thanks for the kind words! I was surprised when I saw this thread. I had completely forgotten about that game. My first post on AA!

 

I still lurk often, but work and real life has kept me from getting involved in any projects. Maybe one day :)

 

PS -- This Fear of the Dark game looks great! Nice work, MemberAtarian!

I really wanted to see your artwork on a finished game cartridge!!!

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Hey man, thanks for the kind words! I was surprised when I saw this thread. I had completely forgotten about that game. My first post on AA!

 

I still lurk often, but work and real life has kept me from getting involved in any projects. Maybe one day :)

 

PS -- This Fear of the Dark game looks great! Nice work, MemberAtarian!

 

Glad that you are still around! Let's make some noise and see if we can get someone to code your game!

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  • 4 weeks later...

Rad game man, sorry I did not see it sooner, but I am going to give it a go later! :) Love the music and the stylistic shadow art!

Thanks for you nice words! I was away for a month or so, because I'm learning Python right now (got the mood for learning more languages), but I'm back for my game project. The boss fight is ready, only the ending and the randomizer of the survivor mode is left. I have completely rewritten the module that decides which sprite to draw (spared 700 bytes) and remade the one that makes blocks disappearing as stomped (got an extra 400 bytes), so I have now a 'plenty' of space again to dream. I moved a lot of the hard parts to vblank, but still the cycle counter goes over 262 if there are too many blocks around you, did not decide which ones to optimize yet, I have 200 bytes left in bank 8. XD

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Great. Really hope this gets finished.

This will be for sure. This is my biggest projekt since I began programming the VCS. These days I optimized, optimized, and optimized, gaining at least 1600 bytes and now the cycle count won't go over 262. Unfortunately, I had to remove the WaterDrop, it took much cycles with a little effect only (mostly only for decoration) and I can use it's X and Y values in the randomizer. I used up all the usable aux and stack, and even the missile variables, and 4 variables are used by single bits. :D

Edited by MemberAtarian
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I never thought I'd hear Iron Maiden on the Atari 2600. Now I have. I love that the 2600 always sounds out of tune, I find it very charming. Also that's a very cool visual effect. Do you do it by making the playfield black, light sprite yellow, then making the sprites go behind the background? (I'm new to 2600 programming, but have been doing NES for 10 years so I know 6502 and have a passing familiarity with 2600, but have not made anything significant yet)

Edited by GradualGames
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I never thought I'd hear Iron Maiden on the Atari 2600. Now I have. I love that the 2600 always sounds out of tune, I find it very charming. Also that's a very cool visual effect. Do you do it by making the playfield black, light sprite yellow, then making the sprites go behind the background? (I'm new to 2600 programming, but have been doing NES for 10 years so I know 6502 and have a passing familiarity with 2600, but have not made anything significant yet)

Hi! :) p1 sprite is yellow, everyhing else is black. p1 always go behind p0 and sprites are behind the playfield. :)

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The game is nearly finished, I'm waiting for some brave gamers who could search for bugs. ;)

So basically, there are two modes, one is called campaign and one is survival. The campaign has fixed, more detailed levels and has a specific goal. In this case, the game counts the number of death, so at the end you will see how many lives you wasted for getting the treasure. :)

After you beat the campaign, the game changes to survival mode automatically. In that mode, you have to wait a lot before you can play, because the CPU generates the stage, simulates if it is beatable and then, it places the bat. Yeah, I wanted to put there more possibilities, but I just ran out of space. And I mean, I rewrote most part of the code and the music is compressed to the limits, but I don't have any place left for calculations. In this mode, the game counts the rooms you completed without dying.

 

 

You can see the footage here, but it's really spoiling the fun of the campaign mode, because most of the rooms have specific rules those take time to figure out.

FearoftheDark0.64_NTSC.bas.bin

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  • 2 weeks later...

Love the game! Very dark and unique. The graphical style between the light and dark is so striking. :)

 

I love the girl too, so cute, the manual, box, etc. art is very nice! :) It is definitely on my list. :D

With your name, I was expecting an ava like this. :) :D

0393f910252283.560e1d9b19a62.jpg

 

I had a strong anime/manga time in my youth and of course, as most fans, tried to make my own manga series, sometimes those skill looks useful. :) It's a bit hard for me to draw a "cute girl", I loved the style of Kuuchuu Buranko, Kaiba or Tobaku Mokushiroku Kaiji over the typical kawaii drawnings.:)

 

This was the first time that during the coding I felt like "I know what I'm doing" from the beginning to the ending", even changing the batari basic kernel a bit, so that makes me really motivated to recreate my favorite childhood game on the C64 to the VCS. :)

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Haha nothing wrong with that, my personal style was initially influenced by Demon City Shinjuku when I started to add bits of anime. However in recent years, it has come full circle back to more Western style.

 

I had come up with the name before Jin-Roh the Wolf Brigade, because I wanted a cool sounding word for Werewolf, that was neither from my Slovak or English, so I went with Jinroh.

 

Totally you are doing great! You have made a great and fun game with such great skill. :)

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Haha nothing wrong with that, my personal style was initially influenced by Demon City Shinjuku when I started to add bits of anime. However in recent years, it has come full circle back to more Western style.

 

I had come up with the name before Jin-Roh the Wolf Brigade, because I wanted a cool sounding word for Werewolf, that was neither from my Slovak or English, so I went with Jinroh.

 

Totally you are doing great! You have made a great and fun game with such great skill. :)

 

I watched anime for 10 years, I think, I have 250+ titles on my list, but I got totally burn out 3 years ago. I always preferred the odd ones, but nowadays, fanservice got too much attention, but I'm still interested in how the japanese society will turn with so much handicaps.

 

 

I'm going to school for programming now and have to help with a house renovation, but I have a new plan again, my childhood favorite. ;)

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...

I like how the OP used music from my favorite heavy metal band, Iron Maidien. The song heard in the above video(s) is from their album Fear of the Dark, which is a personal favorite of mine.

 

The OP did a fantastic job recreating the song on the Atari 2600!

 

For those interested, heres the actual song by Iron Maiden:

 

[irl]

[/url]
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I like how the OP used music from my favorite heavy metal band, Iron Maidien. The song heard in the above video(s) is from their album Fear of the Dark, which is a personal favorite of mine.

 

The OP did a fantastic job recreating the song on the Atari 2600!

 

For those interested, heres the actual song by Iron Maiden:

 

[irl]

[/url]

Thank you, I always feel that my weakness is the sound part of programming, I have no good ear for tones. :)

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  • 6 months later...

Hey,

 

first, thank you for the work you put into this. It's very atmospheric. I can feel the tension! :)

 

Just one bit of feedback: both my Harmony and Stella detect the PAL 60 as being NTSC. So to get the correct colours, with Stella I need to use the NTSC version, and on the 2600 with Harmony I need to use the the PAL 60, since the colour shift will make the orange I see in Stella appear yellow, thus correct. Thought I'd mention this, because maybe this is a simple declaration in the program that's missing? I don't have a clue how this works.

 

Not a biggie anyway, since the desired effect is achieved. I just need to keep both versions :)

 

Cheers

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