Gary's Little Thinks

I’m currently having a think about the upcoming Ludum Dare game competition. I’m trying to decide which programming environment to use - Scratch, MSX Basic or Processing? Ideally I’d like to go for Processing, but I’ve not created a full game using it yet, so it might be a bit of a tall order. MSX Basic might be okay if I can produce something that doesn’t have too many moving objects and too much game logic and I can find a web player for MSX to present it on. Scratch is the one I’m most used to at the moment and it’s quick to pull everything together, but maybe it’s time for a change? I’ve still got a bit of time to decide, anyway.But one thing I was thinking after walking past the local pond over the last few spring days is that I feel like I want to feature it in some way in the game. I don’t know how, but it just seems like it deserves a nod… :-)

My aim for March was to write a game in BASIC for the MSX. I’ve started programming the MSX again recently (I still own a Toshiba HX-10, but am using an emulator) and I was just curious to see what I could do within the speed and graphical limits of it - its processor speed is 3.58Mhz; has a maximum display of 256 x 192 pixels; 16 colours; 32KB user memory. I also decided to do the MSX Basic game in March, because Retrospectiva were running a BASIC game programming contest (deadline mid April), so it seemed like a good opportunity to kill 2 birds with 1 stone. :-)

The game “Splink” ended up being an against-the-clock-puzzler: you have to guide 4 different blue symbols to their matching static 4 green symbols as quickly as possible, whilst avoiding red skull enemies. The twist is that you control all 4 symbols at the same time and they all move in 4 different directions on the press of the same key. For example, you press “1” and symbol 1 moves up, symbol 2 moves down, symbol 3 moves left and symbol 4 moves right.

I enjoyed putting the game together, and it was a useful learning exercise and I enjoy the challenge of playing the game - it was my first complete program on the MSX for over 25 years and I picked up some tips on MSX Basic that were new to me. I had to work out how much thinking and activity the program could undertake before it was too slow to play. I messed  up with the graphics. It has a number of graphics modes and methods of creating images and I went down the wrong route at first thinking I could easily create user defined graphics in a multicolor mode in basic - I couldn’t - got myself into a tangle and had to backtrack. With the power of hindsight I’d have created animated sprites for the symbols instead.

I don’t expect to win the Retrospectiva challenge, but I’m looking forward to creating more games in Basic on the MSX in the future… and in a years time it would be nice to present something that looks good and people find fun to play too.

My February One Game A Month - Talisman Crash - was again created using Scratch. It used the same neon graphic style as my previous game. This time I wanted to make it abstract, fast paced and include the idea of having 2 interacting player characters on the screen at the same time. The final gameplay involved the 2 player characters (talisman) being drawn together by the mouse cursor, whilst avoiding other talisman. One of my favourite games of recent years is “Obey the Game” - I liked the idea of fast and short stages - and I tried to make use of this short stage idea. Each time your player talisman connect you complete the stage and gain power. If you touch an enemy talisman you lose power. Once you reach 100% power you win.

As well as producing a game I was happy with this month I also learnt some new techniques in Scratch - I made more use of multiple scripts for each sprite. In the past I’d focused on using a single looping script for each sprite and basically I’d been making things complicated for myself.

I’ll be trying something different for my March game - a game in MSX Basic. Lots of contraints there, including processor speed (3.5Mhz I think), screen colours and size. I’m just interested in seeing what I can do and there’s a Basic game competition (Retrospectiva) I want to put .