Spot: The Video Game! TI-84+ development thread

[JWinslow23]

That's right, I'm making another calc game. It will be a port of none other than:


(title screen above just a mockup at this point, is not in this version of the game)

As of now, this is an extremely early pre-pre-alpha v0.0.0.0.1.0 version of the game, so do not expect anything more out of it than what it gives as of now.

For those who don't know what that is, it is an NES game featuring the mascot of 7-Up, Cool Spot, which takes on a style similar to that of Othello (Reversi for some people). You can duplicate spots on the board by placing them 1 square away, or move spots on the board by placing them 2 squares away. If there are spots of the opponent's color directly around the ending square, it flips them to your color. Fun concept, and interesting to play.

What I hope to do is to make the magic of that game (yes, even the animations Spot does during moves) appear on my TI-84+ calculator. Sure, this would be simple to program in TI-BASIC, and I may do that at one point as well, but I don't simply want it for the gameplay. I want to test myself to see if I can recreate the stunning visuals in 3-level grayscale on a 96x64 pixel screen. So far, I think I did a good job with the "spot selected" animation.


(I swear, grayscale looks fine on-calc. I don't know how to Wabbitemu settings )

ARROW KEYS - Move your cursor
2ND - Select spot and destination spot
CLEAR - Exit at any time

I have implemented a semi-playable 2 player version (one player takes a turn, then the other, etc). There is no spot flipping yet. Game over and "winning" is also not handled at all, so you must quit out if the board gets full or you cannot move any pieces.

Source code is in ASPOT.8xp. Compiled program is in SPOT.8xp.

With that, it's back to sprite editing and coding. Give me feedback, tell me what you think!

[Sorunome]

This is looking and sounding awesome! Any reason you picked 3lvl over 4lvl?
Also for wabbit gray go to the display settings and play around a bit

[TIfanx1999]

This looks pretty awesome. I knew what it was when I saw the animation of spot you posted. I'm also curious why you don't use 4 level grayscale.

[chickendude]

I'm not sure if you really need 4-lvl grayscale for this, the only thing that uses it currently (that i can see) is the board. It looks great, though the cursor movement and animations feel a little slow to me. Actually, i just played the NES version on an emulator and it seems the speed's about the same. Nice work, JWinslow23!

[JWinslow23]

This is looking and sounding awesome! Any reason you picked 3lvl over 4lvl?
Also for wabbit gray go to the display settings and play around a bit

Thanks! I picked 3lvl simply because I didn't really need it. Besides, 4lvl can be difficult to make look good, as with my (sorry) entirely halted Canabalt project. And I tried, but no setting seemed to make it look better than that.

This looks pretty awesome. I knew what it was when I saw the animation of spot you posted. I'm also curious why you don't use 4 level grayscale.

Thanks. Also, see above for answer.

I'm not sure if you really need 4-lvl grayscale for this, the only thing that uses it currently (that i can see) is the board. It looks great, though the cursor movement and animations feel a little slow to me. Actually, i just played the NES version on an emulator and it seems the speed's about the same. Nice work, JWinslow23!

Well, I DID take the NES graphics and sprite the TI-84+ graphics myself based off of each frame of the NES animations...so there would be a degree of accuracy there Thank you.

Next will be, all of the move animations!

[JWinslow23]

Bump.

I finally started to get animations to work!


The only animation I've included thus far is the up-2 left-2 cartwheel, and if you make any move, it defaults to that animation (so doing it with any other move will look weird, but still work). I also split the "main code" and "graphics and custom variable definitions" into two source files.

Source files available for download in attachments, as well as the compiled program. Tell me what you think!

[Sorunome]

Love the animations!

[JWinslow23]

Love the animations!

Thanks! It took quite a bit of time to get the animation fluent.

[Sorunome]

Do you store each frame or do you somehow calculate them on-the-fly?

[JWinslow23]

Do you store each frame or do you somehow calculate them on-the-fly?

Each frame is stored. So are the relative positions where to draw them. Pixel art was the hard part, though.

[Geekboy1011]

For wabbitemu if you want perfect grey like I mean better then on calculator then you want


Which is game grey 3 shades.

For "as accurate as this inaccurate emulator can get"

The freq slider is set to 60 the shades to 12.

[TIfanx1999]

That looks really nice Jwinslow!

[JWinslow23]

That looks really nice Jwinslow!

Thanks!

I have been preoccupied with school. But I promise, progress is sure to come! I may need pixel artists, however, to design frames of animation. (Boy, this is what programming TEAMS are for, huh? ) Anyone willing to offer, tell me, and I'll tell you what the frames need to be and look like. I will then make tweaks as I see fit afterwards.

[TIfanx1999]

* Art_of_camelot pokes this thread.

Hey, did you ever get any further with this project?

[JWinslow23]

Nothing since my last update. But check out this definitely-will-maybe-possibly-finish-sometime project I'm working on.