Q-bert, the little orange guy with the big schnoz and no arms, meet his cousin, X-bert. Move him around with the cursor keys or joystick in port 1. Apart from a continuing glitch in my joystick code (apparently) the keyboard is the preferred and better way to control him. Hopping onto the cubes changes their color and earns points. Once all the cubes are the indicated color, the level is complete, just be sure to avoid landing on a cube occupied by any other object, except for the green ball/egg, which will begin to randomly appear starting on level 2. Landing on it, will freeze the other characters and give X-bert temporary invincibilty. If X-bert jumps off the cubic pyramid, that's bad news...unless, there is a multicolored spinning disc there, which will whisk him to the top of the pyramid and if Coily, the snake, reaches that departure point before X-bert lands at the top, he will jump off and be out of play temporarily! These are good to use in a pinch, but unused lifts earn extra points at the end of each level. Speaking of points, for every 6000 points, X-bert earns an additional life (up to 6 max, only 3 shown on screen). Lets talk sound. There are 2 kinds, wimpy home brewed sound by me and .wav sounds obtained from the web. The nice sounds are used mostly where gameplay is minimally affected, such as at game start, when X-bert dies, or the end of the level. A few other sounds pause gameplay briefly. If your score at the end of the game is one of the top ten high scores, you will be asked to enter your initials (if you haven't already done so) and your score will be saved. One final note to serious game players, at this time, the maximum high score possible, is 327,675! This should be plenty for 99.99% of people likely to give this game a try.
General comments about this version; this is the initial release, version 1.0. It works, but is not perfect. The sound issue has been mentioned, it's not ideal, but the nice sounds were worth the annoyance of the slight pauses in my opinion and it's currently the best that I know how to do. There's at least one bug, Coily will occasionally jump off the right edge, showing up on the left side of the pyramid. It doesn't happen very often...I'll find it eventually. A bigger issue, that affects joystick users, is occasional double moves. This has the potential to put Xbert on an enemy, or off the edge. I've tried various things to fix this, but haven't hit upon the solution. Lastly, there's some hires screen corruption that occurs. I haven't seriously looked for this, as it doesn't appear to affect the game, but it's a bit untidy. Gameplay is not strictly faithful to the original Qbert...this was never my goal. It's faithful in general, but not in detail.
Additional features; any significant features, such as multi player or adding the character 'Sam', will have to wait until I work out how to put code into hiram, as at 34k+data, I have pretty much filled all of the CX16's user fixed RAM area. Possibly multi player could fit in...
Programming; Prog8 was used to make this. It's not C...for which I have developed a probably irrational aversion to and it's very well maintained by it's developer!
I'm releasing this as an sdcard image file, which contains all required files.
- x-bert.jpg (144.44 KiB) Viewed 4505 times
xbert_1.0.zip
