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How to code Atari XL/XE game in 500 minutes? -not just another stupid marketing! This time I have proof… the timelapse video! This year’s Abbuc SW contest is a bit special, because deadline for compo entries was 31st of July instead of 31st of August as usual, but I handled it somehow similarly as before… I started working on my entry day before deadline.

Idea of 3plex was in my head couple of weeks before, but I was not strong enough to sit behind computer and start coding it in advance. Honestly I have not done anything for Atari since beginning of February when I put Quarrion project on ice (that time I moved to new flat and changed my job, so I was occupied by other stuff). BTW, maybe you don’t remember Quarrion, it was small game (Proof of concept like) prepared for NYD 2015…also coded in rush, in couple of hours. I have to admit that since NYD Quarrion evolved quite significantly and all gameplay/ingame design is already complete, there are indeed some bugs, but the only things that are missing there are music/sfx, title screen… and kind of “hall of fame” screen. Nevertheless I decided to go for new project instead of finishing Quarrion.

So back to 3plex, its a small logical game where you have to place triplets (items of 3-colored tiles) on the board. If you place two or more tiles of same color next to each other, they will disappear. Your task is to play as long as possible until there is no more move (no more empty place for another triplet). Triplets cannot be rotated nor their tiles cannot be swapped, you just have to place them as they appear.

Couple more words from behind the scenes… doing timelapse of coding is not that self explanatory as the other timelapses you can find on youtube, like sunrise or flower blooming nor those where somebody designs game map or retouches girl’s portrait not to look ugly 😀 … So I decided to take 1 screenshot of my desktop every minute and put them all together in video that runs 1 picture per second. Whole 3plex development process took almost 500 images (496 exactly) so the video has little more than 500 seconds because I also added couple of info screens at the beginning and at the end. You can see how I proceed and what it means to make such game from scratch.

So enjoy the video with great 3 songs playing in background composed by Marek Pesout (Poison):

I plan to do couple bugfixes tonight. I’m gonna send updated version of game binary to Sascha, so I will record actual gameplay video later and update this blogpost afterwards. For now you can look at a couple of screenshots:

So 3plex for Abbuc SW compo is complete. Here is bugfix/improvements timelapse recorded as 6 frames per minute and played as 2 frames per second (2hours and 7 minutes of real time):

Both background songs are composed by Marian Vybostok (GoldMaster).

And here is actual gameplay video of 3plex. Since there is no sound in this game, I added some non-atari music from youtube library: