Added a disk image! Now you can download the disk image, then go to https://www.scullinsteel.com/apple2/ and drag and drop the disk image onto the Apple II emulator to play.
I finally submitted my game yesterday (ASCII Maze Game for Apple IIe). It was such a fun challenge! Kept me up at night thinking about how to squish everything in to the space requirements. :-D There was one part where I needed to shuffle 4 sets of 2 numbers and it took me over two lines to do it. I know there must be a better (shorter) way of doing it, but I couldn't think of one. I'm really looking forward to seeing other people's code now, to see how you all dealt with the space requirements!
How is everyone doing on their programs? What's something new that you learned? What's something you've done so far that you're proud of?
I'm getting close to halfway done? Except the program takes just over 3 minutes to start.. 😭 so I need to work on that. I've never programmed in Applesoft Basic before, outside of typing in some mystery code from a magazine when I was a kid. It's been fun reading through 40+ year old documentation. 🤣
Something funny I read in the official Applesoft BASIC Programmer's Reference Manual (Volume I):
Jumping into or out of the middle of a subroutine with an ordinary GOTO subverts Applesoft's orderly control stack mechanism (see "How Subroutines Stack Up," below) and causes the programmer to be in a state of sin. People who indulge in such odious practices should be ostracized from polite society.
Also:
Warning Cross-looping is a second-degree misdemeanor punishable by five minutes in the penalty box and a NEXT WITHOUT FOR error. It will also melt your keyboard.
Ah.. gotta love that old school programmer humor. 😆
I'm using AppleWin, an Apple IIe emulator. One of the best features is the ability to write code in Notepad and then paste it into the emulator. I have so many text files serving as my ghetto git hub. :-D Does this work? Nope! Save that for reference, try again. Does this work? Nope! repeat forever... lol.
I dunno how old you all are, but I used to have a subscription to K-Power when I was a kid. They published programs in Basic for all popular home computers of the era (Apple, Commodore 64, TRS-80, IBM PC, Atari, TI 99/4A) for kids to type in and run. Might find some useful code snippets! https://archive.org/details/k-power-magazine
Alright, I'm not really sure what I'm doing, but I set up some streaming software and I'm fully prepared to flaunt my noob flag at: https://www.twitch.tv/mauszozo
I'm excited for the jam to start, and I'm trying so hard to temper my exploding list of ideas with the reality of what I can get finished in 7 days. 😁 I'm planning on using Unity for development, and I've messed around with that in the past, but it's been years. I'm watching Unity tutorial videos right now because I don't even remember how to start. 😂
I work full time (tech support dork), have kids, yada yada, so my goal is to have a working game by the end of Sunday, 4/4. That will give me 3 evenings and 2 full days to grind something out. Then the next two evenings I can spend on bugs and polishing. And if I need to, I can call in sick on 4/7 to sprint to the end! 🤣 No, I probably won't do that.
So I may not end up with hand painted fully animated 3d characters, procedurally generated dungeons, natural language processing, AI story teller.. lol.. I hope to actually FINISH SOMETHING and get a working game submitted by 4/7.
Good luck to you all. Looking forward to seeing some new Grid Based FPS Dungeon Crawlers!
That's all I wanted to say. :-) I've been looking forward to today for a week or so since I heard about this game jam. Last week I pestered my office mates with sample text printed out in different fonts and sizes, polling them to find the best, most readable, smallest font. Hahaha. The winner was Verdana 7pt, if you're curious.
Anyway, thanks for hosting this Lari! Looking forward to seeing what you and everyone else comes up with, and to share what I'm working on. :-D
Very cool! I like what you did. A couple suggestions - maybe do a palette with 5 colors, including the bright green that GBStudio uses for transparency. Otherwise the palette is only good for background tiles and not characters. The other thing is why did you call it "GB&J30"? That seems like a weird thing to have to look for on the list of palette presets.
