Chickens In Choppers

[CunningFellow]

I posted the hex and source in the UCC2016 thread, but here is a topic about the game if anyone wants to comment on it.

Anyways - here is a video of me playing it (from Uzems record feature)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWnW5ROSPjI

As the youtube description says. It's bits of code from T2K and Asteroids.

Game controls

UP = Fly forward
DOWN = Fly backwards
LEFT = Spin Anticlockwise
RIGHT = Spin Clockwise
Left Shoulder = Fly left
Right Shoulder = Fly right
Button A = fire

Note, that you do not accelerate as fast left, right or backwards as you do forwards. So if you want to do things quickly, you are best off turning around.

In fact if you look at me playing it in the video - you will notice that I turn around ready to accelerate in a different direction before I fly over the cows I wish to pick up.

Also - the tanks are very dumb. They simply turn around to try and face in the quadrant pointing towards you. If they are facing your quadrant they may fire. I find the best strategy to deal with them is to stay out of the line of fire. Fly around them and shoot them from the side or from behind.

[yllawwally]

I think a timer would improve the game. It's a little easy as it currently is. Providing a prompt to hurry up, would help. Or maybe have an enemy like evil otto chase you, or something that steals the cows, if you take too long.

[D3thAdd3r]

I love the name, but I have been resisting taking a look/playing it; trying to have it fresh whenever all roms are available for judges. Well I have not played it yet, but I checked the video and it looks good, nice work!

[Jubatian]

Yes, at first it looks a bit too easy, but difficulty ramps up nicely later! Not that some time limit wouldn't be useful, even if it wasn't a hard limit (like something bad would happen if it was over), just a depleting timer, and whatever remains at the end would be added to the score. Just that after dealing with the tanks, you suddenly have nothing pressing to complete the level quick while it would be nice if the game somehow rewarded that sort of performance.

Anyway, considering that the game was done in just six days (of course clearly CunningFellow had his vector library to build upon, but still, an engine is one thing, a functional game is yet another, and the two are miles apart) it is a very nice original piece, gameplay-wise I think only missing something such to make it feel complete. For the Uzebox presentation the use of high resolution with vector graphics make it have an original feel, could use some polish though. Just if technically possible, I mean the flicker as the helicopter passes near cows or arches, clearly tile-like material, possibly impossible, it seems like an 1bpp mode with colour attributes, but allowing colour to differ it may work somewhat, could be useful to keep arches being visible even as some vector object passes partially or completely over them. By the way do I see a McDonald's reference there? (Just by the game name, "Chickens in Choppers"...)

All in all, quick, but good original stuff!

[CunningFellow]

I will def add a "bonus points if you finish it fast" timer when I have a chance.

I think I can make the static objects (Cows, Arches and eggs) remain visible under the vector objects, but mixing the static tiles and vectors was a bit of a hack to get done in the short time span. There is a .Macro for the "find next free RamTile" part. I modified this to leave alone tiles 1,2 and 3 which are the 3 static object types. I should be able to modify this further to duplicate the tile to a new number and over-draw it when they are under a vector object.

The whole game references a folkish song called "Cows with guns" by an artist called Dana Lyons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIvndWcMuAM. In the song the said cows (with guns) were evading capture so they would not be sent to Macdonalds to be turned into burgers. The final verse of the song goes

The order was given to turn cows to whoppers
Enforced by the might of ten thousand coppers
But on the horizon surrounding the shoppers
Came the deafening roar of chickens in choppers

[Jubatian]

Catchy cow march anthem indeed! Nice adaptation, when a wiki entry will be made, it should be mentioned as some added fun item.

I realized the video mode is simply Tempest's, 2bpp RAM tiles with a SD card streamed underlay, that underlay having fixed black/blue colours while those three coming from the 2bpp RAM tile overlay are freely selectable. 128 RAM tiles as I remember of which one is reserved for "background" (full transparency, the SD streamed content displays), while on the rest it is perfectly possible to incrementally draw stuff. I see what you mention then: just increase the reserved tile count from 1 (tile 0x00 I guess) to 4, and then it should all work fine (of course the little complication is that in programming "more than 1" can be drastically different than "exactly 1", so needs some work, but doable).

[CunningFellow]

Yes - that is how it is at the moment.

To stop the flicker/hiding I have to change the "new tile" macro from being

Get the current tile # for the pixel you wish to change
if the Current tile # is less than 5 then get new tile blank tile # and use it

to

Get the current tile # for the pixel you wish to change
if the Current tile # is exactly ZERO then get new tile blank tile # and use it
if the Current tile # is between 1 and 4 then copy the tile contents to a new black tile and use it

[uze6666]

Edit: Oh - I am currently using the EEPROM block assigned for T2K - as I didn't think about asking for some new blocks assigned. I will recompile it when I get 2 new blocks assigned.

Here you go: 140 - 141(0x8C-0x8D)

Also, can you post the sources please? I'd like to add them to the wiki.

Another thing, I was experiencing flickering of the background on the hardware but not on the emulator. Is that related to your last post?

Thanks!

[Jubatian]

Another thing, I was experiencing flickering of the background on the hardware but not on the emulator. Is that related to your last post?

If you used CUzeBox maybe try to look at it with frame merging disabled (Press F7, the small ghost icon in the upper left area will change accordingly). Otherwise is the SD card you were using capable to run Tempest correctly? Same mode, the blue parts of the image are produced from an SD streamed underlay (so if the card can't run Tempest, it wouldn't display this game's bg correctly either).

[CunningFellow]

I thought I had posted the source in the UCC2016 thread.

I just went a checked it and I could not find it.

So here it is. It is a bad horrible mess. I will use the excuse that I did it all in the spare hours I had over a week I was also busy doing other things.

It is a mash up of the T2K video mode and object handling and the vectorgame/asteroids polar coords and collision detection. So I imagine it also has an embarrassing logical error in the collision routines that make it much slower than it needs to be.

ChickensInChoppers.zip

Chickens In Choppers

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