I had a housemate who could make a cool game in an afternoon. He was a bottomless well of interesting ideas. He works in finance now :-)
Anyway, his games were horrible messes of magical Peek and Poke statements in Atari BASIC. But . . . they were FUN. And they took a couple of hours to write.
One that he iterated a lot on was a titled we called "Alan Turing and the Spiders from Mars".
It was a multiplayer game (most of his games were, because the AI is free when you can just give another player a joystick). It was a simple 2D top-down sprite-based animation with:
- A ton of robots on the screen, milling around and doing stuff.
- Up to three players controlling their own robot (with the rest being computer controlled).
- A "finder" player who controlled a cursor and got a limited number of guesses as to which robots were controlled by real people.
- The players could win by fulfilling some simple missions ("pick up the blue blocks / visit each corner of the screen"), the finder could win by identifying the players without running out of guesses.
Reminds me of a certain popular modern online game . . .
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I had a housemate who could make a cool game in an afternoon. He was a bottomless well of interesting ideas. He works in finance now :-)
Anyway, his games were horrible messes of magical Peek and Poke statements in Atari BASIC. But . . . they were FUN. And they took a couple of hours to write.
Can you remember any examples of the games?
One that he iterated a lot on was a titled we called "Alan Turing and the Spiders from Mars".
It was a multiplayer game (most of his games were, because the AI is free when you can just give another player a joystick). It was a simple 2D top-down sprite-based animation with:
- A ton of robots on the screen, milling around and doing stuff.
- Up to three players controlling their own robot (with the rest being computer controlled).
- A "finder" player who controlled a cursor and got a limited number of guesses as to which robots were controlled by real people.
- The players could win by fulfilling some simple missions ("pick up the blue blocks / visit each corner of the screen"), the finder could win by identifying the players without running out of guesses.
Reminds me of a certain popular modern online game . . .