Gamegearguy

I think I'm responsible for half the Odyssey² homebrew library, if not more. Yet I'm starting work on a new Odyssey² game. This time it's a port of the game Paku Paku. I wondered if the Odyssey² could handle it, so I'm trying to do it. I just started on this yesterday. So there's tons more left to do. It was like that with the Intellivision, some one else did Pac-Line for the Intellivision. And I was sad. But shocked nobody tried to do Pac-Line for the Odyssey² yet. So I'm doing it. Or at least trying to. It's been rough going so far. I had a horrendous time trying to start it since it wasn't agreening with what I wanted to do. But then everything fell into place for some reason and it worked. Weird stuff that happened included only eating dots when Pac-man moved left, only eating dots when Pac-man moved right, Pac-man only eating certain dots. But it isn't doing it any more. Another hard thing to do was putting in the score. Odyssey² programming is kind of like a blind person trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle. The computer tells you if you did something right or wrong. Argh.

Footage of level 1. I hope I'm somewhere near finished...

It wasn't released anywhere, but "Stupidman" by me was written in C. http://www.atari2600land.com/nintendostuff/stupidman.html

A new version of the game has been posted in the link in post #1. Let me know if you find something weird happen if you play it.

I decided to attempt to make a Jaguar game. This is what I have so far, with a little music playing. I had a really hard time trying to make the pineapple be small at the beginning and then zoom up to the front of the screen but I did it. The Jaguar has built-in scaling effects, so I just used them. The sound of it zooming up was hard to make. So was the title screen music. Putting the music into the game was even harder. So now with the title screen completed, I now need to work on the game. In the game, you control a pineapple. There's a bunch of bananas bouncing around the screen. Your job is to dodge them. Think "Dodge-It" for the Channel F. Only with a tropical flair. And with better graphics. You may remember my Pineapple game for the Atari 7800. That is what I'm aiming for. And with the Jaguar's extra power, I hope to have a whole bunch more pineapples bouncing around the screen. One problem is the game size. I only have 2MB of size for the game. I just got done with the title screen and I'm already at 641KB. So that'll be a problem. I got out my Skunkboard and tested the game with my Jaguar and all works well.

I changed the lemon back to a banana. And during the past week or so I finished the game. And now it is ready for release. And it will be released. I don't know exactly when, within a few months or so. I think I did a pretty good job putting this in 2k. I have one byte left, so I really had to cram stuff in there, AND also make it work at the same time. I also came back to my Odyssey 1 project I started a year ago. I designed the overlay to part 1, not to mention think it up. Now I just need to think up of an ending part for it. I didn't get to sleep until 2a.m. since I was trying to program something. I didn't want to give up, but at the same time, I knew I had to go to sleep some time. So eventually I did.

I don't know why, but I keep changing my 2k Atari 2600 game Fruit Fly Fun. I guess it's an attempt to try making it better and better. I never did like the banana in the bottom. So I changed it to a lemon. And I changed the clouds so they look far away. Since they do, I then decided to get rid of the enemies going behind the clouds part since there was no longer a need for it. Most of the work was attempting to avoid jagged edges on the playfield (clouds, lemon). I don't know why it happens, especially on this game, but it has. I had to carefully code the program to avoid it from doing stuff I don't want it to do. That is why the clouds are that shape, that is why the lemon is the shape it is. Putting more clouds on the screen will break what I wanted to do and make them asymmetrical. At first I thought, "Well they're clouds. They don't have to be." But then I thought that was the easy way out, and so after hours more of work, I got what you see here. The banana's shape bothered me. I just couldn't get it to work like I wanted it to. Especially within the confines of me avoiding jagged edges. So I had no other choice. It had to be something different. And so I changed it to a lemon. I wanted it to have tips at the end, but there was no room to do it in. Not that I had enough space, I have around 60 bytes left, it was because the loop was doing too much. I figured that was why it wasn't working well. So I had to cut back a few things I wanted. Now it is in a state where I wanted it to be after a few days of working on it. I picked it back up 3 days ago. So what's next for it? If you want to publish the game, let me know.

When one thinks about 2k games for the Atari 2600, they think of titles like Kaboom, Breakout, and Golf. The first ever Atari 2600 homebrew, Okie Dokie, is 2k. Well, a year ago, I thought I'd take a stab at a better 2k game for the Atari 2600. My first one about a stalk of celery burning vegetarians in an incinerator was just too far out there. It was also my first assembly game. If I was going to make a 2k game, I would need to do it in assembly instead of Batari Basic. I had to stop programming the game because I just couldn't get the scanline steady, which meant the display would jiggle a little when certain things happened on a real TV. Oddly, the emulator doesn't emulate the jiggling display, so I have to play it on an Atari 7800 (or 2600) to see it jiggle. The emulator does however count the scanlines, and if it goes above (or below) 262, the jiggling will happen. So, with the Hamburgers game gear game complete, I needed something to work on. I decided I would come back to this just for fun, to see if I could make the scanline steady. I wouldn't get mad because my hopes weren't very high with this. But a few hours later, I came up with something. I haven't seen the scanline be anything except 262. A red number means the scanline number changes, and it does that if the reset switch is used, but it doesn't jiggle on my 7800. So what is this game? I was trying to think of a game that a.) I could program, b.) would fit in 2k, and c.) be fun to play. I thought of the old SNES game Mario Paint. It had a minigame where you swat flies. The light bulb came on in my mind and I began to work on it. And this is the result: You control a flyswatter (the purple box-like thing). Avoid the hornets and the bees and swat the flies that take a bite of the banana in the middle of the screen if you give them enough time to. The game ends if you touch a hornet, or touch a bee, or the banana completely disappears. And it fit in 2k. I have abour 30 bytes left to make changes or fix bugs, or perhaps add another feature, although I don't know what that would be seeing as how it would need to be only about 30 bytes. The cat has been acting strange lately. They say they do that if there's an earthquake about to happen...

I added a few things to Hamburgers. I added a pretzel that can shoot and moves randomly. The pretzel starts on level 11. It shoots potato chips at you. And since there is a level 11, I got rid of the message on the screen that said the level number. I figured it should say the level number instead of "level 2" when you're actually on level 12. So I just changed it to say "new level." This was apparently not easy to do. I had to spend a few hours trying to get two words to display correctly on the screen. Which futher cements my fear that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. So that's what I did yesterday and tonight.

So I got all done redesigning all the levels. I got some feedback and I tried to put in an explosion sprite for when an enemy gets shot. I had my eye hurt because I was so angry because it wasn't working. So with my eye hurting I had to quit for the night. I woke up this afternoon and worked some more and I think I got it successfully in. I also changed it so the shooting enemies look different than the normal ones. I also decided to start with the milkshakes, then at level 4 introduce the pizza slice, then at level 7 introduce the taco. I also want to introduce a pretzel that would randomly move around at level 11, but I don't know what to make it shoot out. So now I'm trying to recover from my dibilitating eyeache I had last night. It hurts a tiny bit, way less than yesterday. When I have these eyeaches, it really hurts really bad. So bad I have to vomit at one point, which I did last night. I had to taste the horrible orange-flavored chewable aspirin since I used up the horrible cherry-flavored chewable asprin last night. It helped tonight, but I wish it did last night.

Imagine laying on the nice sand at a tropical beach with palm trees, when suddenly a hamburger flies by trying to down a chocolate milkshake by shooting French fries at it. This is level 7 of my game I'm trying to make good. I spent almost all of yesterday trying to put in a second enemy but I ultimately couldn't because I had a couple of bugs come in. So I had to leave it at just one at a time. This picture was hard to do because it kept saying it had 18 colors. So I made it 18 colors and looked at the color table and then saw the sand was three colors for some reason I don't know. So I made it one and now it has 14 colors. The Game Gear's maximum background palette size is 16 colors. I am trying to make the look of the game more cartoonish in the hopes that it will look better and ultimately get released by someone somewhere. The size got lowered down to 128k since I had previously real-life-looking graphics thus making the number of tiles being used for the background bigger. So now I have one bank completely empty, which I hope to add some backgrounds to it for levels 8 and 9. Level 10 seems okay, so I don't need to redo that. I can't wait for Sunday when I'm going to get my hair cut. It's super long and bothering me, making me hot and making my head hurt.

I changed the underwater scene and removed the fish and shark. I also made it so if you shoot an onion ring in the boss levels it actually hits it instead of going right through it. If anyone has any suggestions for the game, please let me know!

I've been busy redoing some stuff with the game. I've been making new backgrounds and longer background songs. Here is a sample of my work so far. I'm also going to add more levels and I changed it from a "get to the end"-type game to a "see how many points you can get"-type game.

I woke up this morning. I noticed the left side of my face was all red and hot. But what was odd is that the right side of my face was fine. I kept occasionally feeling my face to see how hot it was, and it has been going down a little, and the redness has got down a little as well. But it's still there, just not as bad as it was when I got up a few hours ago. This never happened before. I have also been trying to get used to the new development studio for Game Boy I have been using with no problems. It underwent a few changes since I last downloaded it and basically just wrecked all my stuff so I had to redo some stuff and I've been trying to figure out it. I also came back to my Game Gear game. After Flying Hamburgers got rejected, I have been trying to make it better with new music and backgrounds. I also changed it so it doesn't end and the object of the game is to get a high score. I noticed the word "pause" was behind the burger. So I fixed that. It was the first work I had done on the game for about a month. What I want to do next is make a new background and music for level 3, the desert. The level shown here is the redesigned cave (level 2). As you can see, I also changed the score to six digits instead of just three.

Golden Pineapples is like that marble jumping game where you jump marbles over each other like in checkers. There is a twist in my game though: you can move a pineapple even if it won't jump over a pineapple to remove it. Right now there are seven levels but I plan to add many more along with some choosable background music. There are instructions on the game's website. http://www.atari2600land.com/gameboy/goldenpineapples.html This is a screenshot of the Super Game Boy version.

I think the game is completely finished. I'm testing for bugs now. If you would like to help, PM me and I'll send the rom.

OK, so someone at AtariAge helped me to make Bert's pupils black. So I guess the question now is: Would you buy this? I don't want to have unsold copies of this game sitting around. I also have been working on Game Boy programming. I have been working on tree collision on a game I just started called "The Legend of Helga." I improved what I had earlier this morning and now it's working just fine. I'm at a good place to stop now, so I'll pause work on this for a few days and see where I want to take this. I don't know, I guess I'll have to continue work on something or else I'll be bored. I have trouble falling asleep because my mind is always being creative and thinking of stuff to do. When I get tired, I'm usually working on something and sleeping has to wait because I think I'm close to a major breakthrough when I'm actually not and need to find a good stopping point because I don't want to make a simple mistake because I'm really sleepy and then have the game break with no way of finding out how I broke it. (how's that for a run-on sentence?)

After a flurry of programming this morning and afternoon, I finished the paperclip game. Although I did have to spend a few hours making the picture steady, which took a couple of extra hours. But I think I have everything in it: The pigeons, the paperclips, what else could a program about Bert need? Well, someone to publish a few dozen copies with overlay would be nice. I designed the overlay, all someone has to do is print them. And have the cartridges made. Since as to not profit off the game, I'll make it free if I ever make it. Yes, I'll have to eat the costs, but perhaps Sesame Workshop won't go after me then.

So I was looking through my old files on my computer and I saw Bert. I've decided to add another game to Bert's Pigeons. So now it's called Bert's Games. I watched Sesame Street as a kid. But I was too young to have the Sesame Street games for the Atari 2600. Later on in life, I got them all now and a Kid's Controller. And I became smart enough (barely) to attempt to make a Sesame Street game for the Atari 2600. I learned how to program for the Kid's Controller by making a simple Count's Castle (the unreleased but planned Sesame Street game) experiment where it shows a number of bats and you have to press the corresponding number of bats on the screen. But I doubt many people like Bert more than the Count, so I began making it a few years ago. When I started, it was just Bert's face. But then I learned how to write text on the screen with the playfield, so I added the title of the game to it. So there's two games, one involving pigeons (completed), and the other involving paper clips (which I just started work on). I will post more about this game as I program it. You'd think the original Sesame Street games would put the character on the title screen, but no. Plus, the B looks really odd, so I made my own B and I think mine looks better. I know I will probably never get this released due to the copyright of the muppets, but oh well. It's fun making it, so I'll continue.

So recently, I found out that Firefox isn't allowing people to download .bin files because it thinks they're malware or viruses. Since I have ablsoultely no knowledge of how to put malware or viruses into my games, you can safely download my games without worrying about that. I think you have to use Edge to do that however, since Firefox is being stubborn about it. Which is really dumb because I don't know how long it had been for me to download .bin files without Firefox warning me and refusing to download them. Just a heads-up.

No, I didn't choose it to get views. The problem is I just didn't know how offensive it was. I apologize now, even if it does seem too late or insincere, but it really is sincere. I'm also sorry that I'm stupid and didn't study in history class. I'm just an idiot, that's all.

The reason I asked to delete my account was because I feared I lost all my likeability with the previous blog entry and didn't want to be a burden on this forum any more. I'm not a racist, but I guess I should not make puns of that stuff. So here is an edited version of my Atari 2600 game. I spent an hour changing it to something more acceptible to everyone. This is Bob. He's a bird. I need to make a better bird sprite.

I can't find any info anywhere about this.

So I finished my Game Gear game about the burgers. Big surprise no one cares enough to want to publish it. So now I'm on to my next game. I've decided to make a better Soccer Odyssey 2 game. I did 1 on 1 Basketball before. So I worked and worked and worked some more. And I'll probably work more on this unless the game craps out on me and decides to break (which it has done a few times on just this ROM. I had to erase what I had and restart from the past save point a lot.) I have way too much free time on my hands, so I like to spend it on little projects so I don't get bored. I get bored really easily if I'm not working on something. I don't like to watch TV very much now except for the news. Apparently the world forgot "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." Everything works okay for now. I began this project then abandoned it so when I come back to it, I found a lot of spaghetti code. Which was needed because when I tried to change it, 9 times out of 10 it broke something in the game. But now I have it stable. It works on a real Odyssey 2, I just tested it a few minutes ago. So what's next is to add the goals. I think adding some walls would do nicely as well. I could check to see if the ball hits the walls. And for the players I could put in a little extra code restricting movement to inside the field only. Something like this: And then the score can go on the bottom, perhaps a timer as well. Or I could make it the first to 10 goals wins the game. Or would that be too Pong-like? I have 2 spare sprites I can use for something else. Perhaps I'll use them and put in a white-colored net for each goal. But I don't know what happens when one soccer team scores a goal. It's not very likely I'll work on this tomorrow (it's 7:19 p.m. here) since I'm burned out on this already.

update: the game has been finished. You can download a demo version of the game in the link the post above this one.