New Work-In-Progress: Moonshot

I've been a bit busy of late trying to get a new job (I succeeded - I'm off to do games coding in a couple of weeks), but in the meantime a big chunk of retro time came and went, so sadly I missed the RGCD competition. I've checked my code into bitbucket and I'll resurrect it for either RGCD or ABBUC so it's not abandoned, just waiting for a chance to finish it up for a time when more people will be watching.

In the meantime I've been reading the excellent Racing the beam over christmas, which inspired me to have a try at Atari VCS coding.

For my first attempt I've been looking back at various Spectrum and C64 games and remembered playing Bounces, which looks to me like it is a great fit for the Atari hardware - 2 player objects and a ball with some scope for variations and some 2 player action.

I've had to make some changes - in my attempts to make the players look like Knights (I originally wanted to call the game 'Fight Knight' I ended up with something that looked like a robot waring a condom on it's head and I figured I needed a chunky back for each sprite to mask the playfield-drawn bungee chord due to the low resolution, so generic Spacemen/jetmen seemed the way forward.

This is the first test of my display kernel - I haven't added the colouring to the sprites yet (which makes them look a lot more defined), but the main parts of the display kernel are there. I've also got a good chunk of ROM left (for 4K) and RAM isn't an issue just yet so it looks like it's progressing well.

In case you are wondering - I've moved the blanking logic processing down to underneath the play area and put a colour switch in before calling it so I can gauge how much time is being used, so the occasional flicker you see there is the minimal amount of game logic kicking in.