update 02/24/2020: I decided to change the name to Cattle Quest since Quest for Cows seems to be a fairly popular term having to do with some activity in Minecraft that I wasn’t aware of until now.
Hello!
Just wanted to show the game I am building. Today will be the 9th day in development and is very close to being done. By 12 days for sure.
I wanted to make a little shmup but I prefer a hybrid sort of games that combine arcade action with a bit more depth.
So I found I was in fact making a sort of Choplifter style game without actually meaning to. lol It wasn’t intended to be and definitely doesn’t have the same feel at all… but that is the closest I can think of for some context of the goals and so forth.
Basically you control the saucer and you are on a quest for cows. Your ship is armed with missiles and a tractor beam. You collect a cow and transport it to the bin at the very far left of the level and drop it in. The level is 5 screens wide.
Using the tractor beam drains energy as indicated by the meter in the lower left. Run out and the beam shuts off and there is a tiny cooldown for it to recharge before you can activate it again. Energy recharges automatically. You begin the game with 3 lives total 2 lives in reserve as indicated by the icons to the right of the energy bar.
@MLXXXp suggested using the LED. So I implemented this when the tractor beam drains all of the energy the green led will light up and fade down just as an indicator of the Tractor Beam cooldown. When it fades away completely the tractor beam can be used again. I also implemented a simply two flash of the red LED when the game is over.
NOTE: This is a pretty basic game but I find it enjoyable playing on the Arduboy. Originally, I was thinking of making several levels but I kind of just wanted to wrap it up. There is enough space left to add 9 more tile-map levels of the same size.
Sketch uses 22558 bytes (78%) of program storage space. Maximum is 28672 bytes.
Global variables use 1731 bytes (67%) of dynamic memory, leaving 829 bytes for local variables. Maximum is 2560 bytes.
So, with an additional enemy and level transition probably 8 levels total would be reasonable. Who knows… maybe I will revisit it in the future. But I will likely do another project instead.
I focus mainly on gameplay and the speeds and so forth are what seems “right” to me on the Arduboy console itself. It may be a different experience when playing here in the emulator.
Anyway… here is my Arduboy game #1…
CattleQuest.ino.arduino_leonardo.hex (62.0 KB)
I’ve been into game dev as a hobby since the TI-99/4a and C64 days. And I have to say I am really enjoying developing for the Arduboy.
It’s very cool because it is a near perfect combination of constraints and power. The speed is far greater than the ole C64 and there are no limits of 8 hardware sprites per line. These two things alone are HUGE in terms of game design & development freedom.
Of course, the very small amount of RAM and the black and white screen are the real constraints here. But I’m finding those are very easy to work within.
) downloaded then converted from: