Top&Tom 2600

Background

This is my first attempt at developing for the Atari 2600, one of the ultimate challenges for a retro game developer. As a learning exercise I decided to port a fairly simple game I had enjoyed playing recently, with a view to taking the lessons learnt and creating a more ambitious game in the future that might be good enough to be published by AtariAge.

This initial version is NTSC only, I will work on making a PAL-compatible version in the coming days. I'll also replace the music (a demo tune from TIATracker) with a version of the original game's tune once I've got the hang of that.

The code, such as it is, is available on Github: https://github.com/1888games/top

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Controls

• Fire - Begin game
• Up - Makes TOP (blue) jump and TOM (orange) return to ground. Hold to jump higher.
• Down - Makes TOP slam to ground quickly and bump TOM downwards

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How To Play

• The aim is to help both bots avoid the obstacles for as long as possible.
• TOP can only avoid them by jumping. 
• TOM can only avoid them by being bumped downwards by TOP. 
• The height of your jump is determined by how long UP is held. 
• Choose the right time to slam TOP down to bump TOM under the obstacles.

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Scoring

10 points are regularly awarded as the bots move forward without hitting obstacles.

Bonus points between 100 and 2500 are awarded for each set of obstacles cleared, based on how difficult they are to traverse.

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Tip 

There is more leeway to the collision detection on the way up than the way down, so on high obstacles leave your jump as late as possible.

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Tools & Resources

• The fantastic online IDE/emulator/debugger at https://8bitworkshop.com
• PlayerPal 2600 (sprite editor)
• Atari Background Builder (title screen, not implement yet...)
• TIATracker
• Racing The Beam (Ian Bogost & Nick Montfort)
• Making Games For The Atari 2600 (Steven Hugg)
• https://github.com/realdmx/retrore

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Original Game

https://chsxf.itch.io/top-and-tom