Subject: Re: [stella] Programming "Mindsets"?!? From: Ruffin Bailey <rufbo@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Sat, 3 Jan 98 07:31:39 -0500 |
Note: Two different posts are being quoted from in this posts. Sorry for any confusion with authorship. >Football, as poor as it is, is still an example of an innovation, namely >the Venetian blind routine. That, and the constraints of memory (I think >it was only 2k) make it an achievement in itself, albeit overshadowed by >others. I didn't mean to suggest that football wasn't a great game or a great achievement; I wish I could find more people to play that game with me! It was certainly the first in a long line of football sims that eat up too much of my time each year. I even played 2600 Football again last week, and yet another person has fallen into the "Won't play you ever again" list... (and I was using a track-ball!) My point was that the design is rather straightforward. I can quickly see how most everything was done in that game. And today, since I can hardly ignore hindsight, to write this sort of game would not require a Herculean effort (though perhaps something close personally, since it would still be my first game!) The 2600 seems to have been made for this sort of game and the creation of it, like Combat and Air-Sea Battle, is not that tough to figure. KABOOM!, on the other hand, as you pointed out, is a little tougher with two bomb-dropping routines etc. >> the clock. Pac-Man is another; basically Football imo where one player >> isn't repeated with a playfield-player collision check thrown in. What a >> hack! > >What do you mean by a playfield-player collision check? Do you mean >intelligent vs. constant flicker routines? Just that the most obvious addition to Pac-Man that differs from Football, to me, is that the game has to count how many dots one player has collided with in the playfield. I really have no idea how the programmer distinguished which parts of the playfield were pellets and needed to be "drawn out" after they were eaten and which were simply walls. That would take me a while. But I don't think that anyone is going to argue with me that Pac-Man hardly delivers the punch Mrs. Pac-Man does. There were better ways to handle the ghosts, the maze, scoring, and, um, even the background colors were kinda sad. I've personally made the argument that 2600 PM is a "whole new game", but if it's an arcade conversion that one was looking for, and something worthy of packing in with a console to give it more life, Pac-Man delivered about as well as the original Virtua Fighter on the Sega Saturn. That is, it didn't. >> There is no single right or wrong way to write a 2600 game. > >I'd go further and say that's true of any system, and failure to realize >that is part of why so many current games are so tedious. I love Mortal >Kombat II, Tekken II, and a few others for their refined play, but >creativity is truly lacking from most newer games. Oh, well--that seems >to be true of nearly any maturing entertainment industry. But that's really what all that rambling exposition of mine was getting to in the first post. What _do_ you guys think of before you make a game? What other games "inspire" you, if any? Oystron (or was it TPS?), as I understand it, went through a couple of iterations before the gameplay became what it was whereas Bob Colbert's newest game is trying to become a port of an old Apple game from the start. Some games evolve out of experimentation with original demo programs where the author was just seeing what the 2600 could do, and others have the game in mind at the start. I just wanted a little insight into what other people thought about before they began their games. I tend to think about routines that lend themself to the 2600's hardware versus ones where I have to be creative (eg, diagonal platforms like those in Donkey Kong. This is not an easy task if I want a flexible enough core in my game to store many boards in a small amount of memory. Updating a playfield and resetting a player between updates is tough stuff!). Thanks for the replies! Ruffin Bailey rufbo@xxxxxxxxxxx PS Quick Mac update: I have put that on the back burner as I go back to work and order (the horror! What a traitor!) Virtual PC! I feel like I'm cheating, but this whole compilation thing has driven me crazy! -- Stella list is Administered by krishna@xxxxxxxxxxxx <Glenn Saunders> Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/stella.html +-shameless plugs-------------------------------------------------------+ | Stella documentary at http://www.primenet.com/~krishna | | Nick's VCS links via http://www.primenet.com/~nickb/atariprg.htm | | Write the best game, win framed autographs of famous Atari alumni!! | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
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