After a few days of development, Eightbitoids has been released! I built this game as a birthday gift for my nephew when I heard he was looking for an old Atari 2600. As a kid in the 80s I played a lot of games on the Atari 2600 and Asteroids is one that stands out particularly in memory. Though this is the first game I've finished in GameMaker it is not the first I've worked on and I felt I had a solid enough understanding of the system to pull it off. I'm very pleased with the result and I've had a lot of fun not only building it, but playing it also. The simple gameplay is kind of refreshing in a world with games that can be so complex you need to read a wiki or watch a video to have a decent chance of completing it. 

My goal was to stay as close to the original 2600 game as possible but I did allow for some concessions and I didn't worry about getting everything exactly a duplicate. For example, in the original a medium-sized asteroid would only spawn 1 asteroid. I thought it made more sense for a medium to become two smalls like a large becomes two mediums. In a way this makes it a bit more difficult than the original. The original game was obviously limited greatly by the 2600 itself and so your game selection mechanism was a physical switch you clicked to go from mode 1 all the way through to mode 66. You needed to refer to the manual to know which game mode you wanted. In place of that I built a menu for options that I feel could probably have been done on the 2600, or at least something close to it. You may notice there is one missing option, shield as a ship feature. The shield was pretty wonky in the original and if you used it too long it seemed to kill you. It also behaves differently from the other two features: for hyperspace and flip you press down and get the effect but for shield to press and hold. I don't recall using the shield back in the day and I don't think it is leaving much out to ignore it. I overlay the controls when the game first starts as a quick way to tell the player how to play. In the original it was obvious you'd use the joystick, but the specifics were in the manual. I didn't include two player support. This was very important for the 2600 version but less so for a desktop release.

All of the sounds were created using Leshy SFDesigner. I didn't want to copy the original sounds from an Atari 2600 emulator but I wanted something that was similar.

I relied heavily on the scan of the original manual found here and playing the original ROM in the Stella emulator.

I used two free fonts I found online. The main game font is Dust Dot - 2004(C)KUZUMI-HK kuzumi@kuzumi.net http://www.kuzumi.net/

and the menu font is Unscii 8 - http://viznut.fi/unscii/

All of the sprites were created by me with reference to screen caps from the original game. The asteroids are all white and colored with a fragment shader with a randomly selected color. The animated rainbow gradient title is text rendered to a sprite when the game starts and another fragment shader to provide the rainbow. The rainbow appeared on a lot of Activision game artwork of the day and it felt right to include.

The Future

I will certainly fix any bugs that I or others find with the game but it may possibly be expanded as well. I am considering a mobile port with a mobile-friendly control system. I am also toying with the idea of a /hack command to let the player change some of the game settings on the fly for mostly comedic effect. I'd like to hear any ideas that have come to mind when you played the game as well.

Thanks for reading and happy gaming!

Stephan