Lynx 2020 Programming Competition

[+karri]

1 hour ago, Turbo Laser Lynx said:

That 3D print looks insanely good! You've got some really fantastic stuff going on again, setting up your own Lynx factory! I wanna do a co-release with you sometimes again!

Deal! We could PM about the details when time permits...

[No One You Know]

On 8/20/2020 at 7:10 AM, Turbo Laser Lynx said:

Sorry @Igor, I didn't really clarify clearly enough. Anyway it's just a theory, but I think that people always think they will have the time for a lot of projects in the summer time, but in reality when you finally have a few weeks off the grind, a lot of the time is spent recuperating and with family and friends. And thanks again for arranging these fun contests.

I agree with you guys that two months probably is enough, we've seen most people scramble things together in the last weeks before deadline. Maybe a couple of weeks extra for the brain to react "I wanna join too", to think of a game idea and to spread the word of the competition.

@karri thanks for always thinking of ways to do physical releases better! I think a physical release is a dream for many (although there seems to be quite a few that are happy with doing the software only too).

 

This is my biggest issue, I spend a lot of energy being excited and jumping between different "retro"-systems and try to learn about game development for them. Also between music, drawing and game development. Social media adds to this issue, an infinite stream of new things and a trillion new retro games. Also it kind of devalues the fun (but also hard) work of people, since most people now has got a maximum 5min attention span and time for everything new. Best to keep SoMe to a minimum. Recently I got the fever for the Lynx's big sister, since my computer club buddy repaired the psu for my old Amiga 500.

Yeah. I am on quora which has pretty much become like social media because you have a feed and can follow people and have groups that can post things other than questions. It sucks up too much time and i get into arguments that make me a bit depressed so try to avoid it as much as possible. Occasionally i check out what is going on and then find hours have slipped away from me. Yeah I have always bounced around beween being periodically obsessed with certain consoles, games or films, cars etc. It is sort of seaonal. I'll be obsessed with one thing and then lose interest as it shifts to something else but then I will be back again in a few months. But I suppose if I at least get started on a project I might be able to persist. If I did it with someone else I thought it might help but we didn't even get started. I'm not sure how we will do graphics though as we are not good at drawing and have no clue with graphic design. Not sure if that friend's brother who is more into video games might as he is interested in art I think. Maybe Lynx is low res and low colour enough that we it won't be too hard to just manually colour pixels? Music is something I am into but I can't actually compose good tunes and I don't reaally have much of an idea when it comes to proper musical notes.

[Nop90]

@karri here is the 'unofficial' label for Xump2 made by @KevinMos3

 

[Turbo Laser Lynx]

On 8/22/2020 at 11:37 PM, No One You Know said:

Yeah I have always bounced around beween being periodically obsessed with certain consoles, games or films, cars etc. It is sort of seaonal. I'll be obsessed with one thing and then lose interest as it shifts to something else but then I will be back again in a few months. But I suppose if I at least get started on a project I might be able to persist.

Sounds like you're describing me, only with other interests.  Yeah once you get started it gets really rewarding.
 

On 8/22/2020 at 11:37 PM, No One You Know said:

If I did it with someone else I thought it might help but we didn't even get started.

Make really small goals for yourself at first. Get a background image on screen, move a sprite on screen etc. Start out with something really small like OlAtAtari: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/309812-my-atari-lynx-programming-journal/
It didn't take him many days to be up and running.
 

I reccommend "Karri's CC65" + template for a real kickstart. Amongst the best game development frameworks there is for retro systems. https://atariage.com/forums/topic/256753-atari-lynx-game-development-tools-and-tutorials-wip/
 

On 8/22/2020 at 11:37 PM, No One You Know said:

I'm not sure how we will do graphics though as we are not good at drawing and have no clue with graphic design.

On 8/22/2020 at 11:37 PM, No One You Know said:

Music is something I am into but I can't actually compose good tunes and I don't reaally have much of an idea when it comes to proper musical notes.

You can use any placeholder graphics. If things start looking promising I'm sure you can get someone who can make graphics and music on board.
 

On 8/22/2020 at 11:37 PM, No One You Know said:

Maybe Lynx is low res and low colour enough that we it won't be too hard to just manually colour pixels?

Learning about creating visual art and music are processes that take many years, but it's fun so it's worth starting out better late than never. I think knowing some theory about different game dev aspects makes it less frustrating and easier to understand some design choices others make, and obviously a more well rounded game developer. But yes, the low res Lynx screen helps in the way that it's faster. In other ways it can be a challenge, games like donkey kong don't fit without making the sprites too small or without scrolling.

 

[agradeneu]

Great compo! "Only" 6 games but again the quality is very high. Nice work guys!

[Igor]

Again thanks for the comments and feedback...I did want to address the point of a commercial quality title being an entry - that was never in the rules, I love the idea of the mini games though. As I've stated in the past, these competitions are meant to be launch points for something that could potentially become a commercial release, but the you don't have to submit a full fledged game with 10hrs+ of play time. Maybe I should make it more clear in the rules for the next competition!

 

My own entry was going to be a much more involved game, which I still want to make, but given the time constraints I opted to reuse the graphics assets and the character to make a runner. I think I will develop the idea a bit further after the competition.

 

6 games is a huge achievement, you should all be proud of yourselves!

[+karri]

There is really one game with outstanding quality and playability - Xump 2

Fadest also provided a complete, interesting game - Asteroids Chasers

 

Both these games have some real to copy the gameplay from.

 

Then we have the original, really hard game - Timeloop

 

imho these are the top games in this competition.

 

Sybil is fun, but a bit repetitive
Titan is just a graphics "look, what I can do" game with some fun ballistics. It was only 50% ready after the 4 days I had time to write code. I should have read the instructions earlier.
Minimal is also just "work in progress"

[Igor]

So if I make this a definite annual event, would that make it better? ...then just like Sillyventure everyone will know when it's coming up and I'd be doing the promotion side of things only during the event time frame...this doesn't mean that you are limited to working on your game just during those times though. Thoughts?

 

[sage]

On 8/25/2020 at 7:06 PM, karri said:

Titan is just a graphics "look, what I can do" game with some fun ballistics. It was only 50% ready after the 4 days I had time to write code. I should have read the instructions earlier.
Minimal is also just "work in progress"

hehe with this competitors maybe i should have thrown in some 50% done game engine, too ?

[No One You Know]

On 8/24/2020 at 7:32 AM, Turbo Laser Lynx said:

Sounds like you're describing me, only with other interests.  Yeah once you get started it gets really rewarding.
 

Make really small goals for yourself at first. Get a background image on screen, move a sprite on screen etc. Start out with something really small like OlAtAtari: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/309812-my-atari-lynx-programming-journal/
It didn't take him many days to be up and running.
 

I reccommend "Karri's CC65" + template for a real kickstart. Amongst the best game development frameworks there is for retro systems. https://atariage.com/forums/topic/256753-atari-lynx-game-development-tools-and-tutorials-wip/
 

You can use any placeholder graphics. If things start looking promising I'm sure you can get someone who can make graphics and music on board.
 

Learning about creating visual art and music are processes that take many years, but it's fun so it's worth starting out better late than never. I think knowing some theory about different game dev aspects makes it less frustrating and easier to understand some design choices others make, and obviously a more well rounded game developer. But yes, the low res Lynx screen helps in the way that it's faster. In other ways it can be a challenge, games like donkey kong don't fit without making the sprites too small or without scrolling.

 

Hahaha! Thanks for the advice. I'll keep those pages open. So Karri's CC65 is just CC65 but with some extra tools? So CC65 doesn't have anything that Karri's version doesn't? That was one thing I had wondered about before (assuming that CC65 was something still being developed). You can use CC65 entirely with assembly right? It is probably quicker to right in C but we planned to use assembly as embarassingly neither of us know C at this point in time so we were going to use assembly which we had looked at before (with easy6502) and isn't complicated to learn, just to use for big stuff I suppose, as well as because with a machine like this I think you want to have better awareness of what exactly is going on; if you use C and you start trying to do stuff in assembly how long before you start interfering with things you are unaware of? Correct me if I am missing something. I looked at BLL originally but it comes across as something rudimentary that restricts you in terms of what rom sizes you can use.

[42bs]

15 minutes ago, No One You Know said:

looked at BLL originally but it comes across as something rudimentary that restricts you in terms of what rom sizes you can use.

No restrictions at all. You can make 128K to 512K games. Did both.

[+karri]

12 hours ago, 42bs said:

No restrictions at all. You can make 128K to 512K games. Did both.

True. But...

 

There is a small catch. The cc65 suite deals with segments. It is a pretty unique concept where you can re-use memory areas and link code to addresses that are inside these segments. For me this feature makes it easier to manage memory in large games that do not fit in memory at once.

 

In BLL you can come up with your own memory allocation scheme if you need one.

[LordKraken]

@42bs would be interested to know how you created 512kb rom with BLL. I managed to create some but then the game does not start anymore. I'm missing something but I'm not sure what (header? bank switching code?)

[Nop90]

59 minutes ago, karri said:

There is a small catch. The cc65 suite deals with segments.

Thank you @karri for making segments handling so easy.

 

Give a look at Xump2 segments... ?

lynx.map

[+karri]

50 minutes ago, LordKraken said:

@42bs would be interested to know how you created 512kb rom with BLL. I managed to create some but then the game does not start anymore. I'm missing something but I'm not sure what (header? bank switching code?)

In the original BLL you had to match the encrypted bootloader with the blocksize your game used. So I had 3 different bootloaders 512, 1024 and 2048 bytes/block.

 

In cc65 the bootloader is split into a 50 byte encrypted bootloader that does not care about blocksize and a plain text bootloader that works with the blocksize your game uses.

[LordKraken]

yep so I guess I have a problem with the bootloader somehow, because creating the rom with 2048 bytes/block seems to work fine.

Any idea where I should look for that?

[+karri]

57 minutes ago, LordKraken said:

yep so I guess I have a problem with the bootloader somehow, because creating the rom with 2048 bytes/block seems to work fine.

Any idea where I should look for that?

You can just get the bootloader from the cc65. Just type this in lyxass syntax.

bootldr.s

 

Or you could decrypt the loader you have, edit it for the correct blocksize, encrypt it again.

[Turbo Laser Lynx]

@Igor I must admit that I see now that I've also suffered from the "not being able to read the rules" thing. Somehow in the 30th anniversary competition I interpreted the line " Your game must be complete to be judged, unfinished/partial submissions will be disqualified " as that the game must be "100% completed, and that apparently was etched into my brain. I thought this also was the case in the 2020 competition, although I now see there's nothing like that mentioned in the 2020 rules. On the positive side, good to know for upcoming compos that a polished "minimum viable game" beginning is probably the thing to go for.

One thing I wanted to mention here just for fun, is the "crap game" competitions they have for other systems, like for example the "C64 Craptastic game compo" or the ZX Spectrum "crap game competition" . They're always the most popular game compos and in fact I think people many times seem to come up with the most unique- (and of course the most humorous-) ideas in those. It's probably because the developers don't feel the pressure or need to "perform". I guess that's not really been an issue in the Lynx scene, but it is a worse problem in the c64 scene where "retro game dev" expectations seem to have become quite high, and actually perhaps started to ruin a bit of the fun aspect of it all.
 

 

Edited August 28, 2020 by Turbo Laser Lynx

[sage]

3 hours ago, LordKraken said:

yep so I guess I have a problem with the bootloader somehow, because creating the rom with 2048 bytes/block seems to work fine.

Any idea where I should look for that?

can you give details about your chain?

[LordKraken]

newcc65 vintage  and lynxer

[Turbo Laser Lynx]

1 hour ago, LordKraken said:

newcc65 vintage  and lynxer

"Vintage" haha! ?

[sage]

1 hour ago, LordKraken said:

newcc65 vintage  and lynxer

a lynxer still. but why.

[Fadest]

I guess @LordKraken wanted to says Lynxdir as he recompiled it under visual studio :

 

 

[No One You Know]

19 hours ago, 42bs said:

No restrictions at all. You can make 128K to 512K games. Did both.

Right? I just got the impression it was designed to use a special loader cart or something. I evidently didn't look into it deep enough.

[sage]

1 minute ago, No One You Know said:

Right? I just got the impression it was designed to use a special loader cart or something. I evidently didn't look into it deep enough.

no