It is been a busy week at work leaving no time for the Retro Challenge other than setup the machine and read some books about Atari Graphics. After a lot of thinking I’ve decided what is the game I’m going to make (or die trying!): World Cup Penalties It seems appropriate since we are going towards the World Cup 2014 finals to make a game using that theme. An actual soccer match seemed way too much for a month of BASIC programming, and a 70’s pong-like soccer game would also be too little for my Atari 600xl! With that in mind, I decided to make a Penalties game, where two players alternate between defence and attack which I believe is a doable yet fun game to make.
Here is my plan:
- Two players
- Joystick controlled to determine the direction of the ball and the goalie jump.
- Each match consists in 5 attempts each, and in case of draw, the game goes on until someone misses.
- Graphic mode with 4 colours and 160×96 resolution due to memory constraints – My 16K Atari has around 13K available and a higher resolution graphics would leave me only around 5k for BASIC. Using the mentioned resolution would give me around 8K instead.
During the next updates, I will try to discuss a bit more the Atari graphic modes and my choices about it.
Remember that the final game will be available at http://www.VintageIsTheNewOld.com