At 06:15 PM 1/4/2001 -0500, you wrote:
I know this all sounds a little advanced for a starting game, but I'm going
to give it a try. I already have the ship drawn and your able to move it
around the screen (that's a start anyway).
I think you should try to tackle something simpler first, not that you
couldn't pull this off, but there is a frustration-factor when one gets
really ambitious on a first-stab at a new skill.
When you are ramping up the learning curve, just being able to finish a
game, any game, is going to feel like a major accomplishment.
If this project takes an extraordinarily long time, you may burn out before
it's done.
I'm beginning to ramp up to writing my first 2600 game (knock on wood) and
I decided on something that should fit quite easily into 4K. I'm using the
gameplay of Exidy's Death Race as a foundation (based mostly on screenshots
as I can no longer remember playing the real thing), and I can probably
steal a lot of code from Surround and Indy 500 in the process. So we're
talking about a single screen, two cars, and probably only two pedestrians
at a time on the screen, with a non-reflected pseudo-bitmap playfield for
the gravestones, add in a lot of program options and hopefully it will be a
fun game.
That being said, the trickiest aspects of this game (not knowng how the
timing will wind up, of course) is how to avoid flicker. The approach I'm
considering is to play around with missile positions and widths to make
guys out of them the way it's been said that Super Challenge Football does
it.
And by doing the same with the ball I can have at least three pedestrians
or two pedestrians and a wild card sprite of some sort going at once
without flicker.
Given the widths available, there are plenty of shapes you can create with
these seemingly "useless" 1-bit objects which Activision so often wasted:
Here is what a pedestrian might look like drawn this way:
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To animate it, you can't have two legs at once, but you could flicker the
legs enough to give the illusion that there are two legs at once.
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OR do something like this for a running animation:
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I don't think many 2600 games tried this technique before. The way you'd
store the graphics for this would be a series of width and position values
which the kernel would scan through, rather than bitmapped shapes as in the
normal players.
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