[WIP] VICarate 3.5

[aitsch]

an IK+ style karate game with tiny simple stickmen for an unexpanded vic-20. written in assembly language.
the idea to this game comes to me in the early 90th but i had no idea how to design and animate the 8x8 charaters.
i found a member at atariage.com who helped me to design all the animations.

Picture1.png (1.86 KiB) Viewed 525 times

grafics
the player sprites are finished.
sprite overlap is working fine and this overlapping technique is also the reason why the grafics are only monochrome.
wip - the backgrounds
to do - the rest of the game like decoration for scores, ...
to do - start screen, etc.

sound / music
i've implemented sound for the movement and 2 or 3 attacks.
the plan is to have an asian-style intro music (only some tacts) but i am not able to compose it.

all in all i am not happy with sound and the non-existing music. my sound routine is quite simple and not capable to play music.
i am open for a collaboration if someone wants to take part. otherwise the music will be canceled and the sound is only moderate.

gameplay
player 1 can do all movements, attacks, jumps,...
computer opponent does nothing intelligent, only random actions. the challenge is how to design the ai and how to increase the skills level by level.
if there are enough bytes left at the end, i will implement a 2-player-mode.

status
there is a lot work left for this project. i would estimate the stage of completion is somewhere at 20-30 % or so.
lets see what will happen next. my work on it sumbled in the last 2 months. to many other things to do.
for the moment i'm not really motivated to continue the game (33°C / 92°F here).

aitsch

[Mike]

Cute!

[chysn]

my sound routine is quite simple and not capable to play music.
i am open for a collaboration if someone wants to take part. otherwise the music will be canceled and the sound is only moderate.

I happen to be working on a lightweight music player for machine language projects at this very moment.

There's some introductory info here (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9808), and I'd be happy to talk to you more about it. The post is mostly about the data-entry helper, but there's a teeny little player behind the data.

In terms of foorprint, earmark about 150 bytes for the player, and one byte per note for the musical score. If you don't want composed music, we can go really sparse and use a generative technique that I used in one of my games (viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9703), which uses a curated shift register. If we quantize its output to a pentatonic scale, you'll probably get the sound you're going for with less than 100 bytes of ML code.

By the way, the animation is awesome!

[aitsch]

hi chysn,

it would be great if i can use your routine.
do you think it can play this jingle?



in my opinion it is the most typical asian song.

it's wunderfully clichéd

aitsch

[chysn]

do you think it can play this jingle?

in my opinion it is the most typical asian song.

it's wunderfully clichéd

Of course it can play that, if that's really what you want. I think music can be used to elevate your game. Let's talk about it over IM.

[Kweepa]

Looking pretty sweet!

[orion70]

Now that's a tiny (literally ) cute game!

[KomekCommodore]

Nice

[Victragic]

That's crazy, in a good way. What is that, 32x48 pixels?

24 bytes for screen + 192 bytes for bitmap = 216 bytes.

Awesome stuff!

[aitsch]

thx for all comments.
i don't know many fighting games for the vic.
that's why i try to realize this idea and because when i was a teen, i was a big fan of these kind of games.

the players are 2 x 8 each and the background is 32 x 32 pixels. the vic stretches all pixels horizontally so it doesn't look quadratic.

making the video and getting the feedback have motivated me to continue my work.

currently i'm working on the enemies ai.
that is very ambitious and needs a good balance. never did that before.

let's see what happens.

aitsch

[aitsch]

status update:


grafics
- all sprites are finished.
- the animations are great.
- 5 backgrounds are implemented, inspired by the original IK with and without +
- the rest of the game like decoration for scores, ... is done
- to do - only some optimizations

sound / music
- only simple sounds for movement and attacks.
- no success with ingame music. i've no talent for that and and now there is not enough memory left.

gameplay
- 1 player mode is done. the ai could need some tuning
- 2 player mode ist done. the game supports the protovision 4 player interface.

status
- the game is done and i will test now. there are ~50 bytes left for changes.
- the biggest challange is the computer opponent. i've defined 4 parameters which affect the skills. i've to find the best balance for 10 levels. perhaps i will need support for testing later on.
it's not easy to my play my own game again and again ....

aitsch

[chysn]

Can't wait to play it!

[Vic20-Ian]

Great work. Very appealing design, a bit like Game and Watch.