v0.8 preview


I really liked the idea and minimalism of the original game, and wanted to recreate in a "better" form.

Currently I'm trying to re-learn 8bit (especially C64) coding, because I neglected it in the last 20-25 years ๐Ÿ˜„ In the last few months I'm working on another huge project with a very slow progression, and now I needed something "simple" to have some fun and to make something more visually appealing than staring to pure hex codes. ๐Ÿ˜ฃ 

My first and most important goal was to have animated extractors. Each one with separate animation frames to work independently. To achieve this, I had to draw something that looks like a water pump. I'm not a pixel artist, that's clearly visible from here ๐Ÿคฃ

But the animations were working, so I was very pleased.

Ofc, we are working here with "serious" IRQ routines. To win the game, the player must place 250 extractors. But there is no way that a C64 can handle 250 separate objects and their animations.

But we can always cheat a little ๐Ÿค” I don't have to refresh every pump in every frame. ๐Ÿง™โœจ๐Ÿ˜Ž The good old human eye will not be able to see my shitty tricks. So I was very pleased. Again...


It seems obvious, everything is made in textmode with simple characters.

Virus spreading is made with simple screen memory checks, in every frame. Virus tiles are randomly selected on screen, and the direction of their spreading also. It often selects an already existing infected tile to spread to. But because it creates an interesting "waving" effect,  I thought I should leave it in its current form.


Currenty there is no option to place walls, just the extractors. (I don't have time for everything, sometimes I need to sleep too ๐Ÿ˜›)

Plans for the future:

  • This version is more responsive than the original, but it has its own disadvantages. It makes the game more easier
  • It needs some refining of the gameplay and/or a difficulty selector to make the game more balanced and fun
  • The "engine" already has an option to have multiple color sets, it will be easy to implement different themes
  • There are possibilities to tune the virus spread speed and the meteor events too -> multiple levels or maps?
  • Adding extra terrain objects, rocks, etc

Conclusions and notes:

It took me two afternoons to write all of the stuff to the current state. To be honest I was expecting much more.

It's a good feedback for me, because now I see some of the progression of my C64 coding skills. And also I had so much fun while writing all of this, and while drawing the ugly pixel "art" ๐Ÿ˜

The graphics was made with Charpad Pro. (+Spritepad) Code was written in TRSE+asm.

Files

prg-20250723-v0.8.zip Play in browser
2 days ago

Comments

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(1 edit)

Excellent work! I am flattered. I love the animation so much. It works nicely on my C64, cannot wait for the full version :).

For the Apex units, you could alternatively use a few characters (to create the independent effect) and change their data in the charset memory only each nth frame. This way updating them on the screen memory wouldn't be necessary so no matter how many units you have to control, the processing power won't increase within the increase of the objects on the screen.


I like the level of detail you're focused on with the independently working Apexes and virus blobs. Design-wise, the Apex looks different than the animation from the Amiga project I shared on my page, but I like your take on this!

I am working on a few assembly projects so if you would like to exchange some experience, drop me the line :).

I left your program to run for a while, take a look what happened :D