I'm not entirely sure how to start this up except by saying "In the early part of 2014, I want to make KC Munchkin for the Atari 7800". Even though I am an experienced game developer, there is one amazing caveat to this - I haven't touched assembly programming in over 15 years now and I've never done Atari programming at all. This is going to be a major part-time learning exercise for me, but I want to give it a go, and also have this thread up not just to show progress, but maybe show what jumping into 7800 development is like. So every single step of this learning exercise will be on this thread!
So why KC Munchkin? KC Munchkin has the dubious distinction of both making and breaking the Magnavox Odyssey2 console. It was an unusual but very well done Pac-Man clone that caused quite a few early gamers to have a brief flirtation with the system, before Atari declared that it was TOO good of a clone and got the game (the only truly successful Odyssey game out there) pulled from shelves. So it's a natural choice for nostalgic reasons.
Secondly, I've made plenty of Pac-Man clones of my own over the years (though usually in C or Pascal), so I already know most of the gaming logic required. (How to turn this into ASM is a completely different story, of course.) It's also a fairly simple clone, with few bells and whistles other than the crude maze editor (which will be the biggest challenge, I predict) and a high-score table (yes, XM feature here). The basic formula of eating dots, running from monsters, clear the maze, is still present.
KC Munchkin plays mostly like PacMan with the primary difference of the moving dots. There are only 12 of these dots (8 regular, 4 energizers) and they start off in the corners, then slowly move in the maze. The dots increase in speed as you eat more of them until they move at KC's own pace. The three monsters, for their part, are very similar to their Pac-man equivalents, though they don't have a monster-pen per se to move into. Lastly, there is a single square in the maze (where the monsters start) that 'rotates' its wall. That's basically the game in a nutshell.
So.. next step... starting up the design and finding a good assembler package to work under Windows!
So why KC Munchkin? KC Munchkin has the dubious distinction of both making and breaking the Magnavox Odyssey2 console. It was an unusual but very well done Pac-Man clone that caused quite a few early gamers to have a brief flirtation with the system, before Atari declared that it was TOO good of a clone and got the game (the only truly successful Odyssey game out there) pulled from shelves. So it's a natural choice for nostalgic reasons.
Secondly, I've made plenty of Pac-Man clones of my own over the years (though usually in C or Pascal), so I already know most of the gaming logic required. (How to turn this into ASM is a completely different story, of course.) It's also a fairly simple clone, with few bells and whistles other than the crude maze editor (which will be the biggest challenge, I predict) and a high-score table (yes, XM feature here). The basic formula of eating dots, running from monsters, clear the maze, is still present.
KC Munchkin plays mostly like PacMan with the primary difference of the moving dots. There are only 12 of these dots (8 regular, 4 energizers) and they start off in the corners, then slowly move in the maze. The dots increase in speed as you eat more of them until they move at KC's own pace. The three monsters, for their part, are very similar to their Pac-man equivalents, though they don't have a monster-pen per se to move into. Lastly, there is a single square in the maze (where the monsters start) that 'rotates' its wall. That's basically the game in a nutshell.
So.. next step... starting up the design and finding a good assembler package to work under Windows!