[stella] Big Dig (My Other 2600 game)

[Christopher Tumber <christophertumber@xxxxxxxxxx>]

It's not nearly done, but, a couple people have expressed interest and I'm here now, so what the hell...

The reason I got hooked on Space Instigators was that I started looking at using the RESP0/RESP1 trick (you'll se what I mean if you run it) to do the display. And then I switched over in part because it looked like I was going to have to do a major overhaul of the existing routines to try and improve performance. As it is gameplay is not as smooth as I'd like (You have to stand around and wait for blocks to react a little more than you should) which could become a real problem once the missing parts of the game engine are added (As is the game engine actually reacts over several frames, hence the slight pause before blocks disappear or blocks begin to fall) The big thing that needs to be done is that when 4 or more blocks of the same colour come together they should disappear (actually, most everything beyond this that still needs to be done is bascially cosmetic). However, what I've learned with Space Instigators should be really helpfull (Like putting code in the Overscan)

Use joystick to move, joystick+button will cause the block(s) in that direction to disappear. There's no dying yet, but having blocks fall on your head is supposed to kill you... Blocks of the same colour will stick together to form one unit that react as a whole wrt to falling or disappearing.

The second sprite (currently a skull, there should be other related treasures - thigh-bone, gems, arrowhead - Archeaologist theme)  will be a pick-up for bonus points type thing (doesn't do anything at the moment). Scoring will be heavily balanced towards picking them up (1pt per eliminated block vs 100pts per treasure type thing) which can be dangerous due to overhanging blocks and the resulting chain reactions from removing blocks... That OR you may be up against a timer and picking up the treasures will give you more time (But I don't really want to have to display a timer as well as the score. Well, maybe a bar wouldn't be too bad...). Thus increasing their importance and increasing the rate (and therefore potential sloppiness) and which the player has work his way through the blocks..

There's also no score, no sound fx, yada, yada...

I probably won't be back on this one until I've finished UTG for the Vectrex is done (plus maybe a little break after that) but in the meantime here's a little appetizer...

Chris....

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