Assembloids 2600 by Onslaught [web]
For the DEMO (which you can identify in the title screen) the game is limited to a certain number of moves and you start with fewer lives without the option the gain additional lives by a cleared board. Also only four out of the eight faces can be seen. To provide some additional motivation, you reach a new face every 200 instead of 1000 points here! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Assembloids 2600 The original is a flash game by Photonstorm. I ported that to C64 with gfx from the original artist iLKke for a 16KB competition by RGCD who later released the game as a boxed version. For the Atari 2600 I needed a fully new approach. A single face of the C64 would not even fit properly into the 128 Byte of RAM there. Yet, the challenge was to stay within the limit of 4k to stay as original to the Atari 2600 as possible. During the process, Sven 'Ptoing' Ruthner stepped in and gave the simplistic visuals of the game a general overhaul, requiring much much more and new code and really changed the game to the better. I used to work with him before on other C64 related projects and it was great fun discussing (pseudo)limitations of the Atari 2600 with him. The goal of the game is to score as high as you can Scoring is achieved by completing faces in the 4 windows around the central one. After each move a new face-tile is placed in the center and can be moved to the four adjacent windows in case that particular part of the face is still free. Moving to occupied fields costs you a life and the game will slow down considerably to give you better chances next time. There always is a valid solution to place the central tile, so you are the only one to blame.... Once you managed to complete a face it will be cleared and you score according to how how mixed it was. A complete face in a single color scores 300 points, with a single mismatch in color you still score 100 points. 40 points if your face consists of 3 colors and a mere 10 points for a fully mixed face. If you manage to clear the complete board, you gain additional whopping 500 points and an extra life (up to 9 lives in store are possible). After every successfully set tile, the pace of the game increases and it will be harder and harder to make a smart move before the timer runs out and you lose another life. While the timer counts down, the timer bar decreases and changes color. Furthermore 3 alarm beeps will ring before time is out. Every 1000 points you are awarded with a new face gfx (there are 8 different types + 1 additional special face if you reach particularly high scores . There are 8 game modes available. Select them via SELECT in the Title. Game 0 is considered for kids only (!), here the timer bar reduces very slow and there is no speed up at during gameplay at all. For all the other modes 1-7 the speed up per set tile increases with game mode. Note, that the full 8+1 faces are only available in mode 3-7. If you start a game in a new mode, the old highscore will reset. Otherwise the current highscore is displayed in the title screen and after game over. After a couple of seconds, the game will switch into attract mode and start to play a couple of automatic demo moves. This is indicated by an A for automatic in the lives counter. The speed up per tile in demo mode is related to the selected game mode, though it does start faster than interactive game play. For the DEMO (which you can identify in the title screen) the game is limited to a certain number of moves and you start with fewer lives without the option the gain additional lives by a cleared board. Also only four out of the eight faces can be seen. To provide some additional motivation, you reach a new face every 200 instead of 1000 points here! Enjoy and watch out for the game at Atariage.com Some technical details: The faces are realized as player-gfx set to 3 copies. Similar to common the 6 digit score trick, the 2nd player gfx is also set to 3 copies and positioned right next to it. So the left side of all faces correspond to player 1, while the right side is playe r2. There is just enough CPU time left to change the colors of the gfx inbetween the 3 faces of the central row every scanline. To allow for all of the 9 faces, only one half of them is stored, the other one is mirrored. The information on the color and type of tiles on the playfield are updated every frame and in part use the same memory locations as the current score display at the bottom as a consequence of the RAM limit. The lives counter gfx are actually holes in the playfield and the background color is set cycle exact around that hole so the other playfield gfx cover its start and end up. The same applies for the highlights on the windows which provide the subtle 3d effect. You can easily spot that in the stella emulator on the demo when you toggle the playfield or enter debug mode. The offset playfield gfx which stands 'out' of the gfx are asymmetric and required some more careful timing. Their height varies between the PAL and the NTSC version, allowing both version to fill the screen properly. Reappearing graphical features are put into individual routines that are then called on spot to save further ROM. Since 4k is a harsh limit, most routines were rewritten numerous times to realize smaller code and/or more efficient data storage. As the Atari 2600 has no display buffer, all gfx have to be read and written in real time as they are being displayed. The digits of the live counter, i.e. are stored with maximum overlap to free up more space. The effect of the title screen requires the data to be stored in raw format. As one of the playfield registers is only 4 bit wide, the remaining nibbles were used to store almost all of the sound-fx data and for example the moves of the attract mode. I hope you enjoy playing the game as much as we enjoyed making it Martin 'enthusi' Wendt
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