Hi everyone,
I want to announce a new game in development.
Almost done basically (just some dozens of hours of work left 
.
It is a fast paced reaction puzzler in 4k for the wonderful Atari 2600.
Restricting myself to 4k was very important to me, since I consider it
the original spirit of the machine and indeed, I am now increasingly nervous about
the ROM size limit and fight for concepts and bytes already. Some space is left,
but sound fx and a few other things are still missing as well.
I am very confident, however, that it will see the light soonish.
Your screen shows 5 windows. One central and one in each of the four neighboring sides.
A quarter of a face in a particular color is given in the central window and
you can place it via joystick up, right, down, left if the corresponding tile is still
empty - otherwise you're losing one of your precious lives. During all that the timer bar
decreases faster and faster...
Once a full face is complete, the window is cleared again and you score points.
The amount of points depends on the colors as you probably have guessed by now.
A full face of the same color gains you 300 points.
Having 3 face parts in the same color, still results in 100 points.
Only 2 parts of equal color give 40 points and a fully mixed face a mere 10 points.
In case you were able to clear ALL windows, a whopping extra 500 points and an extra
life are added as well!
I started this project as a true one-man show, as for Atari 2600 you have to CODE
all the sounds and graphics anyway. Ptoing, a blessed graphician and a friend of mine,
immediately had great ideas on how to improve the by then rather simplistic screen design.
He is quite a technical guy so once familiar with the basic limitations of the 2600, he
came up with several mockups. Most of them found their way into the game for the better!
So he did the graphical design of the game (including Title logo and skull 
.
Logo and face gfx are not final though.
See below a couple of screenshots. The final game will most likely be available via Atariage
which makes me super happy already The colors and some graphics are subject to change
This is my first finished game for the 2600, though I did quite some coding on the C64 before and the
even more basic cycle counting on the atari really excited me. My only published contribution to the 2600 scene so far
was the endscroller in the ATARSi demo
Assembloids 2600 is based on Assembloids 2013 which I coded for the C64 and was
published by RGCD http://www.rgcd.co.uk/2013/02/assembloids-c64-2013.html which
was a new version of the Flash game "Quartet" by Photon Storm.
In between we were asked and granted permission to port that concept to the Atari XL/XE
as well and it was recently released as 'Assembloids XE'.
What better thing to do than to put forward an ASSEMBLOIDS 2600?!
The game was so suitable for porting from flash, since it could utilize
the colorful bitmap graphics (due lack of scrolling and such) of the c64 and later on the
Atari XE. Ironically, the Atari 2600 version uses its sprites for the faces
I hope to be able to provide some video footage soon
Martin /enthusi
