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You Have to Win the Game [2012] |
Released At :
the Ultimate Meeting 2012
Achievements :
Mixed Game Competition at the Ultimate Meeting 2012 : #1
Credits :
Download :
Look for downloads on external sites:
Pokefinder.org
Production Info
Submitted by Kabuto on 28 December 2012
This is the C64 conversion of the PC game of the same name.
It started as an experiment - after having played the PC version I thought about whether the game with its 128 rooms would fit into the C64's memory. In the end I got all the 128 rooms packed better than 7z could do. All rooms combined took about 32 KB. Adding + packing the charset + a small room renderer increased size to about 36 KB (packed).
I asked the author of the original game and he liked the idea of porting this to C64 so he gave me his C++ source code.
Porting this to C64 wasn't that straightforward:
* The charset is much larger than 256 chars so for every room the actually used characters need to be copied over
* Many chars are HiRes but many also need multicolor. Where results were really bad I manually changed the way it was converted (e.g. text hints: white with cyan border in the original -> white with white border for C64). However in most cases the simple default multicolor converter (use the brightest of the source pixels when both differ) gave quite acceptable results.
* The original physics engine is box-based (-> everything becomes a box, including all the chars of the current room), uses floating point, variable time step sizes and algorithms to keep the overhead of having to handle like 400 boxes small enough. This of course won't work on C64. The first thing I did was porting the original physics engine (resp. its relevant parts) to Java to benefit from Eclipse's nice refactoring tools. The next step was to simplify everything: flatten the object hierarchy, converting floating point arithmetics to integer, and always playtesting it in a simple, rectangular-based visualization to verify that everything still "feels" the same. In the end I had a nice 16-bit physics engine that only needed the upper 8 bits for many of the tests.
* The "bullet hells" were quite tricky to port. Sprites alone won't work, there are just too many bullets to fit into the 5 available sprites (3 are reserved for the player). Character graphics also won't work, as there's often already something else in the character to use. Thus I'm using a mixed approach.
* And especially close to release I ran into not having enough memory again and again and had to use tricks (e.g. overwriting code only needed for initialization later on)
Versions:
There will be a new version sooner or later, featuring NTSC compatibility (physics adjusted to feel the same despite the higher frame rate) and fire button jumping. Please drop me a mail at (my nick name, hint: 6 letters)@untergrund.net if you experience a crash or major bug so I can fix things whenever I'm in the correct mood for doing so.
Planned for next version: NTSC compatibility, jumping on fire button
V1.2 (2012-12-28):
* initial upload to CSDB
* fixed a gate display bug and crashes on pressing RESTORE
V1.1 (2012-12-28):
* released at TuM
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