Games we want to see

[IsaacKuo]

Another idea for a game--a claustrophobic cavern crawl. Rather than an artificial "dungeon" with geometrical walls, you're adventuring in a natural looking cave system.

Imagine you're crawling through an actual cave, only able to see a little bit in front of you because of the dim light from your torch. You can forge on ahead, and fight your way through most monsters if they only appear in front of you, but it takes time to turn around or even just to look over your shoulder--so you're in big trouble if you're surrounded!

I imagine blobby flickery graphics; only the monster directly in front of you is clearly visible. Everything except for your sword and the monster directly in front is rendered in crude 22x23 resolution dithered graphics. The dither patterns get darker with distance; each object is simply one of 7 colors along with a "texture" (a texture is a set of dither patterns).

The objects are monsters, of course, and also a set of overlapping archways representing the cave walls. These cave walls are bumpy archways which aren't simply lined up in a perfect straight line. Instead, the cave is constantly curving left, right, up, and down (like an old driving game). The curving of the caves may perhaps be generated from BASIC/character ROM.

In places, the caves branch, so you can choose a different direction to go. The controls include:

i or <space> : go forward/fight
j/l : turn left/right (you turn 180 unless at a fork)
k : look over your shoulder

The same basic engine may be used for movement above ground, but with trees/rocks instead of cavern arches. Instead of a black background, a white background color is used to represent thick fog.

I guess I'm going after a certain fantasy/horror mood.

[Pedro Lambrini]

After being inspired to play Splatform on the Vic earlier this evening and being so impressed with the scrolling and joystick controls it got me thinking about my favourite C64 game of all time...Wizball!

I would love to see a port or some tribute on the Vic...my favourite 8 bit game on my favourite 8 bit machine=dream come true!

[IsaacKuo]

Is there a VIC20 version of Archon? Considering the resolution of the original's graphics, I think a near perfect port should be possible. The only significant difference would be that the chessboard view would flicker between displaying the background tile and the foreground sprites. This keeps the required high resolution at the expense of flickering.

You'd only see color clash while moving a character over an enemy character.

[Mike]

Is there a VIC20 version of Archon? Considering the resolution of the original's graphics, I think a near perfect port should be possible. The only significant difference would be that the chessboard view would flicker between displaying the background tile and the foreground sprites.

No, Archon hasn't been ported thus far.

Interestingly enough, recently I also made myselves some thoughts about a port:

The board can be drawn entirely from horizontal raster-splits of the background register, and the figures can use the full hires resolution.

I would use A,X,Y with different values, A for the variable tiles, X for white tiles, Y for black tiles. Then, for example, the first row can be plotted like this:

Code: Select all

STY $900F
STX $900F
STY $900F
STA $900F
STA $900F
STA $900F
STX $900F
STY $900F
STX $900F
STY $900F ; black background around the board

padded with NOP's for the 65 or 71 cycles/line, repeated for 16 raster lines. STx needs 4 cycles, spanning exactly 2 characters horizontal.

Before I fall back to any interlace flicker-fest, I'd rather use this method.

If I find time for coding this, I might post a demonstrator by the next weekend.

Greetings,

Michael

[Vic20-Ian]

If you like Archon, check out turn based wizard strategy for up to 8 AI or human players on C64 - ARENA by Cult Games, one of my all time favourites

[IsaacKuo]

Interestingly enough, recently I also made myselves some thoughts about a port:

The board can be drawn entirely from horizontal raster-splits of the background register, and the figures can use the full hires resolution.
[...]
STx needs 4 cycles, spanning exactly 2 characters horizontal.

Wow! That is devious!

Although, upon reflection it doesn't exactly get you anywhere with Archon. To get a nearly pixel perfect port, you want each grid space to be 1 character wide, not two characters wide.

If you horizontally stretch things so that each grid space is two characters wide, then you can use multicolor mode and still get an 8 pixel width for each grid space (the resolution of the original Archon). With multicolor mode, of course, you can define the three shared colors to be black, yellow, and blue--leaving the local color for the grid space. This is essentially how they did it in the C64 version, of course.

[Mike]

Although, upon reflection it doesn't exactly get you anywhere with Archon.

Really?

you want each grid space to be 1 character wide

You should take a more thorough look.

On the C64, the tiles are 12 multi-colour pixels wide, as are the pieces.

I would gladly leave away the black border around the pieces, and paint them entirely either in yellow, or blue.

And VIC's hires pixels roughly do have the size of C64 multi-colour pixels. With 9 tiles @ 2 characters, I span 18 characters horizontally, giving enough room to add the border indicating which party moves, etc. ... I even have a slightly increased resolution with each tile having 16 pixels horizontally!

[IsaacKuo]

Oh, you're right, of course. I did not recall correctly.

[Mike]

No problem.

Anyway, being able to produce a faithful reproduction of the board is only 10% of the job. Robert's software sprite stack would be the ideal candidate to draw the pieces.

And Archon could use a better A.I. Against the computer, it was too easy to win by occupying all magical points.

[Jeff-20]

Is there a VIC20 version of Archon? Considering the resolution of the original's graphics, I think a near perfect port should be possible. The only significant difference would be that the chessboard view would flicker between displaying the background tile and the foreground sprites. This keeps the required high resolution at the expense of flickering.

You'd only see color clash while moving a character over an enemy character.

It was discussed in this thread:
http://sleepingelephant.com/ipw-web/bul ... php?t=1388

Carlsson's mock up:

[Mike]

... and below this mock-up picture, Anders wrote:

As an alternative, perhaps one can use raster timing to constantly change background colour for each square, but it sounds very time consuming and sensitive to timing faults.

This is the way to go! Timing faults shouldn't be an issue anymore - there are now techniques available to do horizontally stable splits. Regarding time consumption: in the game only the cursor and maybe one piece needs to animated, only the intro sequence could be a slight problem. There are 7 "pawns" moving on each side, but really only 2 different shapes.

[IsaacKuo]

Not that it really matters, but I've checked a screenshot and the width of an Archon grid is actually 12 pixels--or 3 C64 characters wide. This would correspond to 1.5 VIC characters wide, which is...inconvenient.

I guess the best compromise is for the grid spaces to be 2 VIC characters wide, and the sprites thus have more space around the sides. On the other hand, you could use multicolor mode to take advantage of the extra space. Most of the sprites are only 7 pixels wide, not including the border. I think only the dragon is wider (by only one pixel).

[carlsson]

Although perfect ports can be fun, you shouldn't despise the possibility of making an unique game borrowing elements from a classic. That is, if the Archon board itself would have unsatisfactory dimensions, just make up a slightly different board layout.

[Mike]

Not that it really matters, but I've checked a screenshot and the width [...] I guess the best compromise is for the grid spaces to be 2 VIC characters wide [...]

I guess this could be implied from what I wrote above.

[...], if the Archon board itself would have unsatisfactory dimensions, just make up a slightly different board layout.

What distinguishes Archon from Chess is the battle phase. Also the rules for moving the pieces are much less rigid, and guarding another pieces, or blocking the path of a piece is not that important.

The raster technique I proposed can produce a 3 colour "square" tile board within any sensible dimensions. It's not necessarily Archon, which could be ported to, or newly written for the VIC.

[Mike]

While I'm not sure whether the game would be implementable on the VIC, one game I'd be interested in is 'Stricken', which is mentioned in 'The Player of Games', a SF-Novel by Iain Banks.

The description of the game resembles Stratego. However the pieces are put in shells, and placed inside a cube(!). The possible pieces are known, but what is inside a shell is only revealed, when a player first makes a move with it. So some part of the strategy involves placing the shells in a way to make the upcoming battle robust against the lack of knowledge in the opening.

Ultimately, you defeat the opponent by capturing all his pieces. Then, when all your remaining pieces at that moment could reach all places of the cube, one achieves a 'full web' (where it only would be mentioned at the end, that it actually had been attained the first time - not by the main character Gurgeh, but Olz Hap.)

At least that's roughly all what can be deduced from the description in the novel. The rest can be filled from our ideas.