09-25-2022, 05:21 PM
One of my first programs, on Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer 2, was a cross between Space Invaders and Defender. It put the player's ship on the screen with one enemy. The player could only move forward to the right-hand side of the small green screen and then wrapped around to the left-hand side. Whenever the bad guy was shot at and hit, the program did a ridiculous blink of the whole screen for a few seconds, with sound. The logic for the bad guy to move around was bad. No wait, another one that I did was alike but the bad guy was always at a random location. Not very playable. It was less playable than the contribution in the QB64 Samples by the programmer from Argentina, in which the bad guy was called "Commander Garri". Always updated with "CLS" LOL.
I actually did a remake of the "random location bad guy" game with QB64 SDL version. However it chooses ten locations that the enemy keeps shuffling among. I created a MOD tracker music file especially to play in that game too.
Also I wanted to go further with a "game" found in the Coco2 manual, which was "text mode" graphics and responded to joystick. It was supposed to be a spaceship plotting through stars to land on a planet. The problem was it always put the planet on a specific corner of the screen and the player only had to set the joystick in like manner so that, "I won." That was with the "cheap" joystick; the "Color Joystick" presented the other problem of having the ability to lock to the center position. "Whoa we're halfway there, oh-ho! Living on a prayer" ROFLMAO. When I tried to change it, it was one of my very first attempts to introduce real animation in an arcade-style game. Another thing was that Coco2 didn't come with Extended BASIC and therefore had to use "PEEK()" to read the joystick button; unlike for reading the positions it didn't have a dedicated command to read the buttons.
The manual also had this program called an "inventory storage", which used string arrays. It employed the slow bubble sort too. I was very ignorant at the time to realize it was the beginning of a text editor like "EDLIN" for MS-DOS, however had to change "INPUT" requests into those that could have used "INKEY$".
I actually did a remake of the "random location bad guy" game with QB64 SDL version. However it chooses ten locations that the enemy keeps shuffling among. I created a MOD tracker music file especially to play in that game too.
Also I wanted to go further with a "game" found in the Coco2 manual, which was "text mode" graphics and responded to joystick. It was supposed to be a spaceship plotting through stars to land on a planet. The problem was it always put the planet on a specific corner of the screen and the player only had to set the joystick in like manner so that, "I won." That was with the "cheap" joystick; the "Color Joystick" presented the other problem of having the ability to lock to the center position. "Whoa we're halfway there, oh-ho! Living on a prayer" ROFLMAO. When I tried to change it, it was one of my very first attempts to introduce real animation in an arcade-style game. Another thing was that Coco2 didn't come with Extended BASIC and therefore had to use "PEEK()" to read the joystick button; unlike for reading the positions it didn't have a dedicated command to read the buttons.
The manual also had this program called an "inventory storage", which used string arrays. It employed the slow bubble sort too. I was very ignorant at the time to realize it was the beginning of a text editor like "EDLIN" for MS-DOS, however had to change "INPUT" requests into those that could have used "INKEY$".