At 10:22 PM 3/26/2001 -0500, you wrote:
This whole idea started because Kaboom! is my favorite game and I wanted
to do something along those lines (very simple and very addicting). I
think with the right speeds and using the paddle, this
Deciding on a controller will affect gameplay immeasurably. Stampede is
very much like Kaboom on its side, but since it uses a joystick, you are
often placed into impossible situations where the constant nature of the
movement makes the game over inevitable vs. a paddle.
That was my biggest gripe about the game, although there must be a way to
master it...
So overall I think paddles will work better, and you can hide the pot reads
in the black lines between tracks.
I think the disk drive motif will be fun as long as it has some sort of
puzzle element to it rather than just the Kaboom gameplay.
The 2600 has seen many variations of the Kaboom theme.
The main portion of the screen (on the 10 tracks) will have the data bits
you need to read.. They will be whizzing past and the drive head will need
to "read" them (e.g. get to it and hit the button). The indicators aren't
for navigation. Think of the "data latency buffer" as a timer - if you
don't read a bit in time, the time decreases. The "byte counter" on the
right side of the screen is just for show and will just increase each time
a data bit is read..
Remember that if you clone a play pattern you have to make something unique
in it. With Stampede, it had a lot to do with the use of the Lasso and the
black angus.
With your game it might be about timing the fire button when you are over
the necessary information you need to read. If you press the button too
soon you will read too much data, too late and you will miss data. I'm
assuming that the spinning motion of the hard drive will accelerate with
each level and the data will become more fragmented...
Let's say that the game reveals a file (as black pixels) one at a time, and
a file can be spread across the platter of the disk (fragmentation).
After each file is read in, a new file is revealed until the wave ends.
After that your task is to write the files back to disk, hopefully avoiding
fragmentation along the way.
Tapping the button commits you to writing as much to disk as is possible
before it bumps up against another file's chunk. If that happens you have
to tap it again in a free area (fragmentation).
So there would be a puzzle aspect. If you know how large a file is you
could get a feel by the pace of the spinning how much room there is and try
to line everything up (similar to Tetris).
I do think adding bad sectors would be a great addition in later waves,
similar to the latter waves of Tetris that throw in blocks right at the start.
Just bear in mind that a game that involves reading and writing bits is not
going to be easy on a system with only 128 bytes of RAM... You are going
to make the patterns repeat, aren't you? Games like Kaboom et. al. were
easy to write because they used polynomial counters and random number
generators and didn't have to worry about what happened to things after the
objects hit the bottom. If you want things to wrap around, you will.
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