Basic Gameplay!

Here is a quick look at some basic gameplay for Bag Boy!

Movement!

I have been hard at work programming. Got some simple movement programmed for the player, customer, cart, and car.

While playing around with the code, I changed up a game play aspect involving the cart. In the previous standard kernel Bag Boy the player would basically intercept a cart before it hit the car. In this version the player grabs a cart and returns it to a customer walking in front of the grocery store.  Once delivered the cart re-spawns.

A couple issues I am having are that the car constantly spawns on the bottom aisle, the player has a hard time holding the cart, and when the cart touches the customer it can sometimes linger gaining extra points or bounce around, get loose, and head back to the car.

I had also shortened Bag Boy's legs by one line.  I had thought he was looking rather tall, especially when compared to the cars.  I am still looking to see if I can stretch out the cars a bit so they don't seem so disproportionately small but I kind of like the way they look. 

DPC+ Sprites

Still working on reprogramming the original Bag Boy over to the DPC+ kernel and have been working on new sprites.

Here is what I have gotten so far:

I have a player, cart, customer, and 2 cars.

My thoughts on game play is having difficulty get progressively more difficult with the cars going down the various lanes while the shopping cart may move towards one of them.  I am thinking as things get harder the cars may present more obstacles.  I was also considering using the customer as either a hazard, as in he will chase after you if the cart is in play for too long or possibly have a wave where the cars are parked and you must get to the customer first from when they leave the store to when they get to the car. Once you touch them they turn into a cart that you return to the store.

These are just all thoughts that are floating around right now and is way in the future but I feel that I have more opportunities with the DPC+ kernel than the standard one, which I found I reached 8k rather fast and it had very simplistic graphics.

DPC+ Experimentations

Progress has been slow on my game due to life but I have been slowly working on it but if my understanding is correct I will need to rewrite a lot of the code to try and keep it at or under 8k.  Plus I had used up all of my variables early on when I used them a lot when I had first started not understanding the Atari's limitations fully. 

Because of these reasons, and my wife's insistence that the square car better resemble a car it had led me to try and experiment with other kernels, such as the multi-sprite or DPC+ kernel.  While I was doing alright with the multi-sprite kernel, I had felt that the DPC+ might provide with more opportunities for the game that may cater better to my skill level and desire.  I would still like to finish up Bag Boy! using the standard kernel but I think while I work on rewriting the code I can plug it into the DPC+ kernel with some graphical improvements and some game play tweaks that might be positive. 


So the standard kernel would be "Bag Boy!" but I am considering the DPC+ version be something like "Bag Boy Plus!" or something along those lines to differentiate the two.  I think doing a standard kernel version would be a great challenge and learning tool.

Anyway, here is a simple screenshot of what the new playfield and sprite for Bag Boy looks like at the moment:

This could be seen as an improvement over this: