Top&Tom 2600
A downloadable game
Background
This is my first attempt at developing for the Atari 2600, one of the ultimate challenges for a retro game developer. As a learning exercise I decided to port a fairly simple game I had enjoyed playing recently, with a view to taking the lessons learnt and creating a more ambitious game in the future that might be good enough to be published by AtariAge.
This initial version is NTSC only, I will work on making a PAL-compatible version in the coming days. I'll also replace the music (a demo tune from TIATracker) with a version of the original game's tune once I've got the hang of that.
The code, such as it is, is available on Github: https://github.com/1888games/top
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Controls
- Fire - Begin game
- Up - Makes TOP (blue) jump and TOM (orange) return to ground. Hold to jump higher.
- Down - Makes TOP slam to ground quickly and bump TOM downwards
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How To Play
- The aim is to help both bots avoid the obstacles for as long as possible.
- TOP can only avoid them by jumping.
- TOM can only avoid them by being bumped downwards by TOP.
- The height of your jump is determined by how long UP is held.
- Choose the right time to slam TOP down to bump TOM under the obstacles.
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Scoring
10 points are regularly awarded as the bots move forward without hitting obstacles.
Bonus points between 100 and 2500 are awarded for each set of obstacles cleared, based on how difficult they are to traverse.
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Tip
There is more leeway to the collision detection on the way up than the way down, so on high obstacles leave your jump as late as possible.
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Tools & Resources
- The fantastic online IDE/emulator/debugger at https://8bitworkshop.com
- PlayerPal 2600 (sprite editor)
- Atari Background Builder (title screen, not implement yet...)
- TIATracker
- Racing The Beam (Ian Bogost & Nick Montfort)
- Making Games For The Atari 2600 (Steven Hugg)
- https://github.com/realdmx/retrore
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Original Game
Download
Install instructions
You can play the .a26 file using the free emulator Stella, or the online emulator Javatari: https://javatari.org
Not tested on real hardware via flashcart - yet!
Comments
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This game is awesome! I tested it on original hardware using a harmony cart and it works great. The only issue I have noticed is that if you end with a highscore in the 10,000s it it chops off the 1 on the highscore in the subsequent games. (ie if you get a 15,520 your high score will show up as 5,520). I have been playing this a lot over the last 2 days and there are some combos of moves that I know are possible but that I almost always fail on. I'll get them!
Cool game!
i got really excited when I received an email notifying me that you’d made a new game, then I realised it wasn’t for the C64. I was so disappointed! You’re a bloody genius and I bet there’s loads of people like me missing your input on the C64 games scene. Anyway, all the best.
Thanks Tony, I'm still working on bits and pieces when the mood takes me, so there might be the odd game now and again.
Did Atari 2600 dev make you want to return to C64 game dev yet? :P
I really miss those quality games too.