[stella] Hello, and.. my game

["Fabrizio Zavagli \(home\)" <rasty@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone!

I've subscribed to the Stella list for a few weeks now, but still had to
introduce myself.
For short, I'm a 28 y.o. Italian who goes by the nick of "Rasty" on the
AtariAge boards.

Having found some spare time on my hand lately because of some illness, and
also thanks to the inspiration and motivation I've got from all of you 2600
coders, I've finally got it to starting coding on the 2600 some weeks ago.

Thanks to the great samples, code snippets and hints that I've been able to
retrieve from The Dig and of course the Stella Archives, and to an
unexpected burst of patience on my side, I've found it that I was
progressing quite nicely and so, to make a long story short, I've made the
step and from some tech demos I've put together, I've starting working on a
game.

I'm no 6502 wizard, in fact this is my first "big" 6502 project. In fact I
had several troubles with the asm itself to start with, but practice makes
perfect or, in my case, at least slightly better :)

I've been waiting to release a demo until it contained some gameplay and now
I believe it got to a status where it should at least give an idea of my
game concept (that of course is evolving as I add to the game).

The object of the game is relatively simple: you're controlling a ship in a
crowded space. At first, your ship will be docked to its base on the lower
part of the screen. Position it with left/right and move up to release the
ship. At this point you'll have to dodge the moving objects (rocks, ships,
and so on) and get to the top of the screen. Once there, you'll have to get
into a hole and catch the tasty treat (food) that lies there.
Got the food (warning: it'll change into an enemy), you'll have to get back
to the base and connect in order to advance to the next level (currently got
3 levels in, after that you'll get back to level 1 for now).

And that's what's currently in. I'm still lacking counters
(score/lives/level..), intro screen, intra-level screens, and sound (as
usual :)). I'll hopefully be adding a "fuel" indicator also, to serve as a
timer and that will slow the ship down when it's low.

Well, enough for the game description.

Technically speaking, I've started building on the "How to Draw A Playfield"
demo by Nick Bensema, even though very little's left from it :)
I've taken something from some code snippets posted on the stella list also,
most notably the X positioning routine by Andrew Dawie and the stick reading
one... Well I was working on bulding some myself, but once I saw good,
working ones... couldn't resist :)
Modified both, though. Will work on these more in the future.

The kernel is something I pretty like. Of course it's nothing revolutionary,
but I'm glad I got it without the artefacts that I thought I'd get being
this my first production.

Testing has been done on several emulators and a CuttleCart.
The game is currently NTSC (both lines and colors).

Ok sorry for the huge message, hope you've been able to at least partially
read it or try my little WIP game.. That, by the way, I was thinking about
calling "Space Treat", but I'd love getting suggestions about the name (and
about the game itself)!!

Again, thanks to everyone's kindness for sharing their sources and
knowledge. I'm attaching my source also, but it's quite a mess and I doubt
it will be useful to anyone :)

Fianlly, thanks to Thomas who's been very inspiring for me :)

Greets,
Rasty.-

Attachment: treat.bin
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Attachment: treat_src.zip
Description: Zip compressed data