Denial

This is just a work in progress, I think. I woke up from a very uncomfortable dream and decided to make a game about it. Play it and let me know what you think. Without spoilers, if you don't mind.

Basic, unexpanded, joystick. (you know my steez). Post #4500!

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Hey Jeff, congrats on your dream and for being so prolific on the forum. Your games always have a distinctive look'n'feel. What's the point of the game though? I tried it and collected diamonds and (a few) hearts, but after a while my little friend went to sleep again... ZZZ...

Thanks for playing. I think the game must have missed its point.

It's kind of an art game. And there really is a point to it. If you get a chance to play it again, could you tell me what your score was? How many hearts did you actually get?

First time I played, I caught 10 diamonds (50 points) and only one heart - but I guess it was a bug because I tried several times since then, and realized that if you concentrate on catching the diamonds ignoring hearts, you totalize high scores; but if you try and get the heart, you never can reach it, and diamonds slowly fade away...

Moral of the story:
"if you pursue love, you end up poor and lonely, so you'd better try and make money ignoring the mirages of the heart" .

Right?

Spoiler:
You can't get the heart. It's impossible. The diamonds also go away at the very end in the "epilogue"...

So I got the sense of the game... I was deceived by the occasional catch of one heart in the very first game .

Very interesting!
And nicely presented as usual!

I got 95 at most. Nice game but maybe not very capturing in the long run. I think it would fit well into a multi-game like Game Theory.

Ok, I should just explain myself, because that was a total flop. The game is not meant to be fun. Or even thought of as a game. It was an effort at allegory.

I thought the title would be meaningful or give a sense of my intent. Once you get the diamonds, I had expected you would realize that there are two scores, and one is always zero. Chasing the heart is futile and the face changes expressions the more you try, becoming more and more sad.

I had hope the diamonds would be less tempting than the heart because they are plentiful and easy to get. I had expected the focus would then be on the heart. Or at least scoring one heart. At the end, the number of diamonds collected are meaningless because they immediately diminish to zero.

It was meant to be a game about the nature of aspirations. I've been trying to make games that focus more on meaning or feeling rather than entertainment for the last few years (and talking to other programmers who do the same). I'm just not very successful at getting the effect I'd like. I'd welcome any suggestions on how to make my point more clear.

Have any of you ever played Jason Rohrer's Passage? It gets tons of slams from players who don't find the it fun, but I wonder if it will appeal to any of you retro gamers. Or communicate something beyond the game play.

I understood fine - if anything it was too obvious

Maybe the heart should chase you, and your job is to avoid it.
When it catches you, you win.

btw, joystick isn't working in my emulator, can you tell me what line handles joystick input?

matsondawson wrote:btw, joystick isn't working in my emulator, can you tell me what line handles joystick input?

What line??? You set it up in VICE's settings.

What line in the code reads the joystick port...
I think it's line 1 and it's reading from 37151 (register 15), which is the no handshake version of register 1 on the via.

Ah, it wasn't my joystick code, it was the random number generator on the vic doesn't work if the via timers init at 0. As the random number generator uses uninitialised memory on startup. Fixed now.

http://www.mdawson.net/vic20chrome/vic2 ... /dream.prg