Retro Game Coders
Retro computer/console game + dev community
I just received in the mail one of my favourite games of all time. Originally Berzerk (I didn’t realize the spelling until now) was an arcade game, and as well as the Atari VCS/2600 version here, it was ported to many, many systems, both officially licensed and ripped-off. My first in-depth experience was playing a …
In this tutorial we will write a cross-platform, retro C program that accepts keyboard control of a text-based player character on screen.
Programming in C traditionally starts with outputting “Hello World” to the text console/terminal command-line. In the previous C tutorial we looked at that code but didn’t examine it, so let’s do that now, and expand to include input from the user so we can start making useful code. We will also look at the essentials …
Learn to code in C and create your own retro games with this free multi-part C programming tutorial series. But first, why learn to program in C? TL;DR C is one of the most sought-after languages in its own right, it has spawned or inspired lots of other super popular languages, and learning C is …
In the final (for now, at least) entry in this series, we are going to pull everything together into a playable “Shoot the Invaders from Space” game that has keyboard and joystick control, killable enemies, moving bullets, and a scrolling star field backdrop …
There is one last popular option for scrolling the screen and covering it gives us an opportunity to introduce the special AMOS animation language, AMAL …
In the previous article, we created a tile map and did a simple scrolling screen using Screen Copy. While it worked, and demonstrated some cool aspects of AMOS, it wouldn’t really be efficient for use in an action/arcade game, is there a better option? Also, can we load the map from disk? There is also …
Up until now, our AMOS BASIC programming has relied on loading quite large full-screen images as our backgrounds. That is not memory efficient, plus creating maps and levels this way would be quite cumbersome. The go-to solution is to create a tiled map. We will look at loading and drawing Icons, and how we can …
Previously we looked at how AMOS can load images and configure screens, and layered scrolling via a feature called “Dual Playfield”. If we are going to create playable games then we will also need graphics to represent the player and the enemies. Colloquially we call these sprites, but in AMOS the term sprite has a …
