Progress In Programming

Over the past couple of weeks, through trial and error, I have become more comfortable programming with Batari Basic and the Visual Batari Basic software.  Some changes I have made boggled my mind and some corrections I made I still don't fully understand but I have noticed that with each passing day I am able to rectify much of the past day's mistakes and achieve a goal similar to what is in my mind.

With that being said, I have made some progress and have an update to my game!

Since the last update, I have added a couple of things.

I had finally figured out how to enter in variables and so I have been able to correct the acceleration of the shopping carts.  I also realized why the cart would sometimes exhibit erratic behavior - in creating code for a potential second player, I accidentally gave the first player some control.  This in addition to my simplistic AI would give the shopping cart a huge speed boost.  Now that that has been corrected, the game is kind of playable.  The cart randomization still needs some tweaking but for the most part the cart can be captured.

I had also added a screen shake.  I had originally added it for whenever the player gets hit by the car but for some reason it activated whenever the cart hit the car.  I kind of liked it so I left it alone.  I will probably change it once I take care of more important programming issues.

I had also added the basis for the power ups by utilizing the ball sprite and randomizing it's location every set amount of cart grabs.  I kept the number low so I can witness it spawn but will eventually change it to a random range.  Ideally I would love the power ups to appear as a different color from the background, possibly with it having different colors with each color changing different attributes but I am not sure how to implement such a thing or if it is at all possible.

I had also started playing around with the different stages of the game.  To provide varied game play and added challenges, I was going to add a rainy and icy playfield.  Essentially the background color would change to either blue or white, respectively.  In the snowy stage I randomize the Missile1 sprite and plan to change the inertia of Bag Boy so that he may slide a bit.  In the rainy stage the missile sprite has a height of 4 and goes from top to bottom.  I also mirror the sprites so that there are additional carts on the playfield making it more challenging.  I may try to implement wind as well but that is miles away.

In this latest change I had also played around with the title screen a bit.  I am still trying to figure out how to use the title screen editor and want to eventually make a better title screen that allows you to select difficulty and number of players.  While this can be achieved with the switches, I think it would be cooler if it was an onscreen menu.

I also fixed that whole player/car collision issue.  It seemed that when I rearranged the order of the code for collision it seemed to fix the issue. 

Added Player/Car Collision and Sounds

I am still working on figuring out the code for slowing down the shopping cart and making it gradually accelerate.  I also want to learn how to use constants better so that I can utilize a difficulty setting in the title screen but for now I am working on general game play.

I still haven't animated the sprites (I cannot seem to get the code to work when I inject it into my program).  I am going to have to find some other examples.  What I did add was a collision detection between the player and the car.  This results in the loss of 10 points, randomly regenerated player one, and a noise.  I have also added sound for the collision between the cart and the car, with a different noise, and then a rumbling sound for the sound of the car.  I may try to add a kind of Doppler effect on the car noise to kind of give it a bit of dimension. I had also realized that all the collision sounds were the same because I had used the same variable. 

I had also added a function for the fire button to reverse the direction of the car to test out possible "power ups" or second player features. What I may do is randomly generate playfield pixels of different colors at different intervals.  These pixels may improve various aspects, like increasing the speed of the player, mirroring the player sprites, or give functionality to the fire button. I may also try to add second player functionality by allowing the second player to control the cart and the car.

I had also found a pretty cool screen capture software to play around with to provide better video.

Bag Boy - The Beginning!

Getting started on programming Bag Boy!

Basically, the premise of the game is that Player 1 is the eponymous hero, Bag Boy.  Bag Boy must prevent the wayward shopping carts from striking the passing cars in the parking lot.

Setting up the game seems pretty straightforward.  Playfield and Sprites were entered.

Starting Playfield:

Cart Sprite:

Player 1 Sprite:

My initial goal with programming these items is to become more familiar with the game play, with my assumption being that escalating the difficulty of the levels would be easier.

Currently, I am thinking game play will involve randomly generated shopping carts. I am considering using the missile sprites to act as cars that will move across the screen, similar to the cars and trucks in Frogger.  The shopping cart will have an attraction to a car and the goal of Player 1 is to get the cart before it collides with the missile. Doing so will increase the score while a collision between the car and missile will decrease it.

As the score increases I will likely utilize the multiple missile sprites and the ball sprite as well as pixel obstacles.

Here are emulated screenshots (I apologize about the quality of the image - the laptop I am using is very limited and so I had to resort to using a camera until my new computer arrives):