Bananas are good...so you want to protect them from the nasty fruit flies! They're coming after your banana! What are you to do? Armed with your fly swatter, the object of the game is to swat as many flies as possible.
I want to keep this at 2k. It's a fairly simple game mechanic, so I was able to make a fancy title screen. There are still some things left to do, like sound effects, and timer adding. So this isn't done yet. I do have 224 bytes left which should be enough space. To start a new game, press fire. You'll see a fairly primitive-looking banana on the screen (this is the 2600 after all.) Move the flyswatter around with the joystick and press fire to swat the fly. Press the reset switch to go back to the title screen.
Good start. You should expand the game to 4k.
Add two frame animation to the swatter when the button is pushed it can snap down.
Flash the fly red when hit.
Add a heath bar or tally that diminishes when a fly has contact with the banana. Or just have the banana slowly turn brown.
More enemies to swat or not.
Bee that must be avoided.
Ants that attack along the ground.
- timer using pfscore. When the timer gets to 0, the game ends. If you hit a fly, the timer resets.
- added a sound effect for hitting the fly.
- game over screen. to get back to the title screen, wait three seconds. I found that if you were going after the fly and pressing fire, that it would flash the game over screen, so I put in a three second or so delay.
All this in 2k (but I have one byte left. And I struggled to put this in 2k.) I will only make it 4k if I deem it absolutely necessary. Right now, I'm trying to see what I can fit in 2k.
Another new version. By making the playfield blocks one color, I was able to free up more space. I added a few of neotokeo's suggestions.
+ instead of having a game over when you miss a fly, the banana just turns a little bit more brown. When the banana gets really brown, then the game ends.
+ I made a swatting animation.
+ I also made it the more flies you swat, the harder it is to swat them. Right now, the flies get harder at 10 and 20 points, but this is just for testing purposes, and I can and will change it. To what, I don't know. 25 & 50? 50 & 100?
Big improvement with the latest version. The timer ups the gameplay.
Thanks. Here is an image from a minor adjustment. As you can see, I made the swatter blue. I was having trouble with the files I downloaded to make player0 under player1, so I just switched it around.so player0 is the swatter and player1 is the fruit fly.
I had a banana going the other way, but I changed it because it looked really crappy and not like a banana at all.
New version. I had the fly changing direction faster, hoping that it would result in it being harder to swat, but that turned out not to be the case. After making some changes and freeing up some room somehow, I made the fly speed up at 25 points and again at 50.
If you keep button pressed and the fly touches the swatter you kill it. Easier gameplay but not very realistic.
Thanks for saying something about that bug. I fixed it.
I put this in as well, but I'm fearing that makes the game a lot easier. I nearly doubled my highest score. What do you think?
I like it better that way....but that's just me.
Perfect, the game only needs hi score.
I'm afraid I don't have room for that.
I deleted the banana on the title screen to free up room, but the example shown on the bB website does not work.
rem rest of the code.
I've tried to put the similar code and it never works for me. What could I possibly be doing wrong?
Edited by atari2600land, Wed Jun 1, 2016 2:03 PM.
It does make it easier but way less frustrating to play.
rem rest of code goes here.
I even copied and pasted it and it still doesn't work.
You didn't mangle it in that version, but you're not doing anything with it. It's like you have a car and instead of putting the gas in the gas tank, you pour it through your window and complain that your car won't go.
;  Sets up the score swap, clears the swap bit, and sets color.
;  Auto-play check and high score flip.
;  Adds one to _Master_Counter.
;  Skips this section if counter is less than two seconds.
;  Increments _Frame_Counter and clears _Master_Counter.
;  seconds have gone by.
;  Sets auto-play bit and jumps to main loop setup.
;  Flips the score swapping bit.
;  Jumps to current score if swap bit is off.
;  Displays high score (blue) and skips rest of section.
;  Displays current score (yellow).
I also have similar code for auto-play in the main loop. If a game has a game over screen, I also have similar code in that section.
OK, I think I figured it out. The problem was I wasn't putting the code in the titlescreen loop. This version should work now, I tested it. Due to space restrictions, I didn't check the first two score numbers, so I blanked them out.
So, should I call this done? I'm a little worried about a note in the music. If you sing along with it, it's where you sing "bananas today..." the first time. Does the bass note there sound okay?
It could be called done if you keep it at 2k. I think it could turn out to be a really cool game if you expanded it to 4k and added more features to it.
One thing that bothers me is if you hold down the button when close to a fly it will commit suicide by running into the swatter.