It's a blob! What does it do?

[MausBoy]

I've picked out a favorite project to finish up, polish as much as is possible for someone with my skills, and release. It's a platformer featuring a blob and so far 30 strange levels. The story is:

 

You are Blob. Today is the day that you seperate (literally) from your siblings and make your way into the world.

The problem is that blobs have a very short life expentancy and you need to find a mate.

You start each level on a grassy cliff to the left of the screen, and have to get Blob over to the one on the right - without drying up.

You can ooze across flat land, up & down the sides of anything, and across some small gaps.

Moving vertically dries you out faster than moving from side to side.

Absorbing worms, mushrooms, and other things helps you stay fresh longer, but they are sometimes hard to reach.

 

Absorbing a snake allows you to fit into tight spaces.

 

Spiders give you the ability to move upside down.

 

Soap lets you turn into a bubble and float anywhere for a short time.

 

Fish allow you to swim in large bodies of water.

 

Absorbing flowers attracts bees, who will drink you. Once one has, you can control it for a short period before you absorb it.

 

You can also punch and kick the crap out of anything that comes close to you, and there are plenty of running, hopping, flying, and swimming enemies. Lizards just eat a big chunk of you, making you pretty small until you absorb something. This can be used to your advantage on some levels.

When you finally find a mate, you combine and set off to find a proper nesting ground. It turns out blobs give birth in deep caves right next to grassy cliffs. These levels are mostly vertical and have completely different enemies, obstacles, and powerups. When you find the perfect nest, you have your babies, and a baby blob minigame starts. When it's over, you have the option of playing the game again with your new Blob Jr, some new enemies, powerups, and levels. If you beat this game you get the final ending.

 

The game is a lot of work, but so far I think every level is fun and the game dosn't get to repetitive in my opinion. There are different ways to beat each level, lots of easter eggs, and some guest appearances that give it some extra replay value too. If anyone has any comments or suggestions that would be great. I will post a wip bin soon.

 

 

All of the other games I've posted about here at AA are ongoing projects and will be completed sometime this summer.

Edited June 21, 2006 by MausBoy

[deathtrappomegranate]

I thought that you were talking about Ronaldo when I read the title...

 

Seriously though, the concept sounds slightly complicated to me. It's difficult to judge without actually being able to play something - I'm looking forward to your WIP!

[MausBoy]

It sounds more complicated than it is, the gameplay is actually pretty straight-forward and fluid. I'll post a few screenshots when I get some more of the placeholders replaced with the final sprites, and a bin when the first level is more or less finished.

[moycon]

WOW! This sounds GREAT! It's amazing what some people can come up with and pull off. It kinda reminds me a tad of A Boy and His Blob. What a great and original game that was. Will this be available for sale?

[Cybergoth]

Will this be available for sale?

 

Most likely right after his other two projects are finished.

[Artlover]

Yeah, this sounds pretty cool. I can't wait to see a WIP.

[neotokeo2001]

 

[MausBoy]

 

That's great, even the right color!

[MausBoy]

WOW! This sounds GREAT! It's amazing what some people can come up with and pull off. It kinda reminds me a tad of A Boy and His Blob. What a great and original game that was. Will this be available for sale?

 

Thanks I think I overhyped it a bit, it's really just a run-of-the-mill platformer, just a little less repetitive and predictable. The thing I'm most proud of with this game is the enemy AI. Every enemy has a set of 5 attributes that can be set to on, off, or random. So for example a snake on one screen may act completely differently than one on another screen. The first two attributes determine attack method, which can be 'run from player on site', 'ignore player', 'attack player on site', or 'attack player instantly'. These can be changed in real-time, so things can happen like; a spider attacks you, you punch it, and it hauls ass up the side of the screen. So sometimes you have to be really aggressive when you want to absorb an enemy who's 'power' you need.

The few 2600 platformers that exist don't seem to have a lot of AI besides 'move toward player' and/or 'shoot at player' so I think the extra effort I put in on it is kind of a step up from average.

 

This game is in no way inspired by AB&HB, but the similarities are definately there, even besides the blob. Not sure yet if this will ever appear in cart form, but I hope so.

[liveinabin]

This sounds superb. I'm definately up for this

[Jess Ragan]

I have a hard time believing that you'll be able to pull this off on the 2600. Have you considered moving the project over to the most robust 5200?

 

JR

[MausBoy]

It's definately not easy, the hardest parts being good game balance with so few sprites, and accurate collision detection. Since the player can only move left/right OR up/down when stuck to a surface, and can sometimes move upside down(reversing everything), the collision routines have to be doubled AND mirrored, fun.

I'm really close to the screenshots/bin, just ironing out a few things.

[MausBoy]

I was getting frustrated with how the collision detection was working, to many possibilities to jiggle the joystick and squeeze through solid places, and the motion when changing direction was all choppy.

 

I've reworked it to use a missile and a ball so the game knows what you are touching in all directions, and in every frame. So far I'm really impressed with this new system, it's really fluid and looks damn good, and most importantly it works. The downside is I've lost another object to use for enemies/obstacles/powerups, and the playfield was already a bit barren.

 

I'm getting kind of excited about this game myself, I'll try to post screenshots sometime today. I can promise this game is like nothing else you've played on the 2600.

 

Some wierd new stuff I've added:

 

Moles; when you absorb one, you can tunnel through any surface for a short period.

 

You can now turn rigid for a second to bridge medium sized gaps. The downside is that when you are in this state, enemies can run across you, possibly escaping to hard to reach places.

 

You can now stick to two walls that are close to each other and shimmy up the middle. The benefit to doing this instead of just going up one of the walls is it blocks enemies from getting past you, the downside is that they can take advantage of your inability to attack in this situation. Which you choose should depend on how bad you need a particular enemy's power.

 

Now when you try to absorb enemies that aren't knocked out/dead, they can explode back out of you, draining your energy and taking away whatever special power you had beforehand. This was changed so that you can't just perch above a surface and wait for enemies to walk under you.

 

Added falling animations, now you splatter if you fall onto a hard surface, and living things scurry. Adds some strategy to 'hunting' enemies.

 

 

I keep thinking of new things, sooner or later i'll get around to level design which will mean a WIP bin.

Edited June 28, 2006 by MausBoy

[MausBoy]

Oh yuck. I just noticed that since I added a missile to collision detection, enemies can only be one color. bB uses a missile to fill in playfield gaps, and the other to add color to sprites. It wouldnt work out so well for my blob to be trying to figure out if the wall it's climbing up has ended, if the wall is full of horizontal gaps.

I'm attaching a bin of the collision routines; this is NOT a game demo, just a demo of the reworked detection so far.

Today i'm going to add the lines that allow you to straddle two close walls that face each other, which would be 100x easier with both missiles to work with.

 

There is truely no good way for me to use bB for anything besides those oldschool arcade games that look like little pieces of construction paper being pushed around on a black tabletop. I was born in 80 so that's just not my style. Don't get me wrong, I love those games, there are just already more than enough of them.

 

Batari, please please wake up and smell the extra ram! At this rate plenty of new PCB's will be available by the time any game that needs them gets completed. I love your programming language, but I'm itching to use it to create a new generation of VCS games, not a bunch of throwbacks to it's first two years of life.

blobmotion.bin

[+batari]

Oh yuck. I just noticed that since I added a missile to collision detection, enemies can only be one color. bB uses a missile to fill in playfield gaps, and the other to add color to sprites. It wouldnt work out so well for my blob to be trying to figure out if the wall it's climbing up has ended, if the wall is full of horizontal gaps.

I'm attaching a bin of the collision routines; this is NOT a game demo, just a demo of the reworked detection so far.

Today i'm going to add the lines that allow you to straddle two close walls that face each other, which would be 100x easier with both missiles to work with.

 

There is truely no good way for me to use bB for anything besides those oldschool arcade games that look like little pieces of construction paper being pushed around on a black tabletop. I was born in 80 so that's just not my style. Don't get me wrong, I love those games, there are just already more than enough of them.

 

Batari, please please wake up and smell the extra ram! At this rate plenty of new PCB's will be available by the time any game that needs them gets completed. I love your programming language, but I'm itching to use it to create a new generation of VCS games, not a bunch of throwbacks to it's first two years of life.

Personally, I think using missiles for the sole purpose of collision detection is a waste of kernel resources, as collision detection can be done using tables and calculation outside the kernel. Harder, but doable.

 

But that's beside the point. There are two new RAM-carts that have been announced. But at this time I think it's a little premature to pick one or the other before their utility and price point have been esablished.

 

The Chimera looks promising, in that it should be suitable for some really fancy and somewhat straightforward kernels, given its built-in queues. But with its two 9572 CPLD, USB-to-serial glue chip, and 32-bit coprocessor might make it one expensive cart.

 

The 4A50 looks versatile as well, and should be capable of equally fancy kernels (albeit harder to program for as I think it has just one queue), but its single 9536 CPLD seems that it would be cheaper. But then again, the Chimera might be subsidized so the price point might be competitive.

 

Another thing I'm hoping for is a SARA chip cart to be released, as I would definitely support that. I started on my own SARA cart but I couldn't get my prototype working properly due to timing difficulties, as it was 100% asynchronous. But there are rumors that someone else is working on a SARA cart, so let's keep our fingers crossed.

 

Well, I should also note that a bB game (Maze Craze 2) takes advantage of the Supercharger's RAM. But I'm hesitant to pursue this too much, as the Supercharger's 6K of ROM is just too limiting.

[SeaGtGruff]

Batari, please please wake up and smell the extra ram! At this rate plenty of new PCB's will be available by the time any game that needs them gets completed. I love your programming language, but I'm itching to use it to create a new generation of VCS games, not a bunch of throwbacks to it's first two years of life.

 

Actually, as long as you're running your bB programs on an emulator or programmable cart that can handle any of the bankswitching methods that include extra RAM, then there's no reason you can't use extra RAM in your bB programs.

 

For example, last year I posted some modified include files, a modified batch, and a "postprocess" program, that added M-Network bankswitching to bB, which has 2K of extra RAM. Earlier today I made similar changes to bB 0.99b so I can use the extra RAM in Sudoku. I'll be posting an update later tonight, so you'll be able to look at what I did.

 

The standard 8K/16K/32K bankswitching methods that batari added to bB 0.99 can be used with the Superchip's extra RAM. That's only 128 bytes of extra RAM, but it doubles the total amount of RAM you have available. All you have to do is (1) make sure your program code doesn't compile in the $9000 through $90FF address range, because that's where the extra RAM is; (2) use $9000 through $907F for writing to the extra RAM; and (3) use $9080 through $90FF for reading the extra RAM. The first part might be a little tricky-- I haven't tried using any of those bankswitching methods with bB yet-- but the rest is easy. I'm kind of preoccupied with Sudoku right now, but I'll see if I can figure it out later and post an example.

 

Michael Rideout

[MausBoy]

The reason I asked Batari to support it natively is so he can add more features to the language itself, such as using pfcolors and pfheights together, more variables, software sprites, etc.

 

ps - but thank you for the info on bankswitching and bB

Edited July 24, 2006 by MausBoy

[Jess Ragan]

I still say that if you're going to make a game this advanced, you might as well bring it to a platform that can do it justice. Even a highly skilled 2600 programmer working in assembly language would find it very difficult to do what you plan to do with Batari BASIC.

 

Step up your game and bring it to the 5200 instead... there's a BASIC compiler for that as well.

 

JR

[yuppicide]

Sounds like an awesome game.