Circles (C64 BASIC 2K)

Join a sequence of at least two adjacent circles of the same colour to clear them and score points, the more are cleared in one move the more you score.  

Cleared circles will be replaced by new colours dropping from the top. You can move around corners to create L, S or U shapes, however you can't move back on yourself to draw a T-shape for example.

You have 90 seconds to build as high a score as possible.

As with my other entry it will only be playable in the browser until the competition deadline passes. Programmed in BASIC on TheC64.

Controls - Joystick in Port 2 (when released on C64)

• Left, Right, Up, Down (Arrow keys) - move reticle
• Hold fire (Z key) - join circles
• Release fire - clear joined dots

Background

I wanted to see just how tight the Cassette 50 restrictions were for BASIC programmers and what was possible.  Like assembly games, BASIC games are to be restricted to use only memory below $1000, which can be done by inserting POKE 56, 16 at the start of the program to move the 'top' of BASIC to $0fff (I think that's how it works!). After doing this you will have just over 2,000 bytes free.

I thought a puzzle game was best suited to BASIC, rather than anything that needed to move fast or respond instantly to joystick control. I'm not a proficient BASIC programmer by any means, and my first attempt to make a more complex block-based game ran out of memory very quickly, so that will be re-programmed in assembly. I ended up with a reasonably playable and responsive game. You can see by the game having no title screen, and 'T, S, and B' being used instead of 'Time', 'Score' and 'Best', I was down to the last few bytes! I also had to remove the delay after the timer ran out, so it just carries straight on into the next

So you certainly won't be able to achieve as much depth in your game as you would with assembly, but perhaps you can still come up with something better than a lot of the original Cassette 50 games.