Re: [stella] Programming "Mindsets"?!?

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!

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