WIP: Jumping Cube

[carlsson]

Yes, there are many indirect clones that don't apply the isometric 3D view, but few that bring new elements of gameplay that makes it more fun or interesting than the original game. One of my least favorable games is Mr Cool, also for the C64. Instead of a pyramid of cubes, you have horizontal lines to jump on, so they really dumbed down Q*Bert to something that might even work on a RCA Studio 2 or some graphical calculator.

Anyway, I haven't yet written a single line of code and already renamed the project. This is what I call Real Development.

[MADrigal]

Well, while we're at "indirect" Q*Bert clones, I can think of two more on the Commodore 64: Slinky (by Cosmi / Paul Norman) and Juice (Tronix).

I had them both, and loved playing them both!

[MADrigal]

Anyway, I haven't yet written a single line of code and already renamed the project. This is what I call Real Development.

I also had Mr. Cool, lovely!

Please consider my help if you need to design graphics. I would do it with pleasure

[carlsson]

Sure! You can get to design whatever the main character should look like, if it ain't a Q*Bert type of guy. Also I suppose enemies (at least one, in the long run two or more) can be worth considering. I suppose for sprites we'd use 16x16 patterns, perhaps with an overlay for details in another colour as Kurt mentioned about the TI-99 version. Actually as the top surface of each cube would be 16 pixels wide and 16 pixels high, perhaps the characters should be about 12 pixels wide to fit. Once I start coding, I could mock up some shapes to begin with if you haven't come up with something.

[Kurt_Woloch]

Mr. Cool reminds me of the way Parker Brothers ported Q*Bert to the Odyssey^2 / G-7000.

Anyway, out of curiosity, I tried to analyze the sounds used in the original arcade version of Q*Bert. Keep in mind that the machine has a 6502 as a dedicated sound CPU driving a DAC, and it also has a speech synthesizer. Most of the sounds are actually generated by using a table of a sine wave, although sometimes it's used in surprising ways. For instance, when Q*bert falls down from the pyramid, the sound CPU fills up the lower half of the sine wave, like this (assuming an 8-bit table):
If value > 128 then play value else play 128

Also, the table often intentionally gets aliased in order to sound "sharper", for instance, playing the wave so that each wave only uses 16 values.

In parts of the sound when Coily eats Q*Bert, the sine wave gets clipped, probably by shifting it to the left and discarding the leftmost bit in the process.

Finally, the sound when Coily jumps after Q*Bert is not a sine wave, but a pulse wave with a 12% duty cycle. I think this could well be emulated with the noise generator set to periodic noise (as you do now with the bass notes in your music demo).

[MADrigal]

@Carlsson: I'll try to work out some graphics for you soon

@Kurt: I once read that the certain Q*Bert Coin-op cabinets had a metal ball inside, which was made falling down to the wooden bottom whenever the main character fell down from the pyramid, making a TRUE "boom" sound effect. Not sure if the story is true, though, but would be fun if it is!

Edit: from Wikipedia:

Following a suggestion from technician Rick Tighe, a pinball machine component was included to make a loud sound when a character falls off the pyramid.[6][7] The sound is generated by an internal coil that hits the interior of a cabinet wall. Foam padding was added to the area of contact on the cabinet; the developers felt the softer sound better matched a fall rather than a loud knocking sound. The cost of installing foam, however, was too expensive and the padding was omitted.

[MADrigal]

My very first graphics for the game.

Please notice that the characters makind the are slighty different to the ones designed by Carlsson, I succeeded in avoiding the "horizontal faces" to touch with each other. I like the result very much.

Since each horizontal face is 24 pixels wide, I think that a width of 16 pixels would be fine for enemies. So I designed the "ball" enemy as a full 16x16 pixels sprite.

Assuming the ball has 2 colours, I tried 2 options: adding the "light", or the "shadow". Which one do you prefer?

Assuming the ball has 1 only colour, I would suggest the "shadow" version. Through the "shadow" you'll of course see the pyramid colours. Making a "transparent light" would be horrible imo.

Gonna design more enemies (I would do 3 enemies total), the main character and the "teleport pads".

[MADrigal]

Here's a new preview of the game graphics I'm drawing

- added the "squeezed ball" in 3 version: monochrome, 2-colours w/shadow, 2-colours w/light

- added the teleport pads in 2 versions: "fixed ring" w/changing colour pattern, "turning disc" w/fixed colour pattern

PS: teleport pads colours are yellow/green/red/blue as in the original Q*Bert game. If you want the game to be a "pseudo-ripoff" of the original game, I would suggest to change those teleport pads into something different, for example a square monochrome platform, which colour could blink like a rainbow.
Hope you like them

[Kurt_Woloch]

Uh... yes. The background graphics now correspond exactly to the ones in the arcade version.
But keep in mind that if you do it in graphics mode, you would need different versions of the characters that contain a portion of the cube tops... one version for each color the cubetops are able to attain simultaneously.

As for the sprites, there are different size balls in the arcade version... the purple ball where the snake hatches from is the biggest one, the red balls are medium, and the green ball is the smallest one.

[carlsson]

It looks excellent!

I'm already prepared to have the same graphic pattern in multiple colour sets, and draw the right pattern depending on gameplay situation.