{"id":1123,"date":"2015-08-22T23:53:11","date_gmt":"2015-08-22T21:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matosimi.websupport.sk\/atari\/?p=1123"},"modified":"2021-03-14T22:18:19","modified_gmt":"2021-03-14T21:18:19","slug":"the-bitchy-witchy-dead-game-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/matosimi.websupport.sk\/atari\/2015\/08\/the-bitchy-witchy-dead-game-project\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bitchy Witchy (DEAD) game project"},"content":{"rendered":"

I started working on The Bitchy Witchy around year 2007. It is already 8 years ago – pretty unbelievable. It supposed to be point&click adventure like no other on Atari. Basic idea was to create game that will be similar to Gobliiins where you control hero on single screen and after you solve puzzle you will be able to move to next screen.<\/p>\n

I introduced this project on AtariAge <\/a>couple days ago also with screens so you can find some info there. This blogpost is mainly behind the scenes.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Whole game was idea of Vladimir Vostenak, he somehow “appeared” in 2007 and started to literally pouring one graph2font picture after another. His pictures were quite impressive because he often (maybe always) used DLI changes of background color so there was not single color register same in whole picture. Also his pictures were not exactly pixel-precise, which somehow added kind of artistic style.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Vladimir prepared many in-game screens which were basically g2f pictures, my job was to make game of them. What a crazy idea… It required many hours spend on what could be possible and what it means to code it. There were several ideas floating around, but we decided to make it really point&click so I had to find and implement some nice algorithm that will calculate path between actual position of player and position that was clicked by cursor. As we have already learned in elementary school, shortest path between to points is line… but that is something we could not use, because our game character is human and there were obstacles on every location so it had to look like in reality so we said that our hero must be able to avoid obstacles and find way to target position.<\/p>\n

This of course required some underlying mask that would define which places are reachable and which are not. I created small tool just for this called PathMaker:<\/p>\n

\"bw_pathmaker\"<\/a><\/center>I just loaded BMP of game location and selected reachable positions with mouse. Then I transferred it to mask in GR.5 mode… and then I started working on pathfinding engine. I don’t really remember where I found algorithm that I eventually used, but it was sort of flooding algorithm that also kept information about distance from source point so it was able to follow shortest path to target.<\/p>\n

You can see it working here, first binary has delay between two steps so you can see how it proceeds:<\/p>\n

\"bw_pathalgor\"<\/a><\/center>
\r\n
\"PathTest<\/a><\/div>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n PathTest S Animaciou<\/a>
\r\n pathTest_s_animaciou.xex
\r\n \r\n \r\n <\/div>\r\n
\r\n

<\/p>\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n
Category:<\/strong><\/td>Others Atari<\/td><\/tr>\r\n \r\n
Date:<\/strong><\/td>August 22, 2015<\/td><\/tr>\r\n \n <\/table>\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n
\r\n 5.9 KiB
\r\n 1029 Downloads
\r\n Details...<\/a>\r\n <\/div>\r\n
<\/div>\r\n<\/div><\/p>\n

Second binary is running full speed:<\/p>\n

\r\n
\"PathTest<\/a><\/div>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n PathTest Bez Animacie<\/a>
\r\n pathTest_bez_animacie.xex
\r\n \r\n \r\n <\/div>\r\n
\r\n

<\/p>\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n
Category:<\/strong><\/td>Others Atari<\/td><\/tr>\r\n \r\n
Date:<\/strong><\/td>August 22, 2015<\/td><\/tr>\r\n \n <\/table>\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n
\r\n 5.9 KiB
\r\n 1168 Downloads
\r\n Details...<\/a>\r\n <\/div>\r\n
<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\n

Here is also binary that has joystick control implemented, but it will allow you to make only one target point (there is no loop, it just hangs):<\/p>\n

\r\n
\"PathTest\"<\/a><\/div>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n PathTest<\/a>
\r\n pathTest.xex
\r\n \r\n \r\n <\/div>\r\n
\r\n

<\/p>\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n
Category:<\/strong><\/td>Others Atari<\/td><\/tr>\r\n \r\n
Date:<\/strong><\/td>August 22, 2015<\/td><\/tr>\r\n \n <\/table>\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n
\r\n 3.8 KiB
\r\n 1056 Downloads
\r\n Details...<\/a>\r\n <\/div>\r\n
<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\n

Hmm.. that’s basically all that was implemented in this stage. This path “engine” was never actually used together with g2f picture (in real game screen).<\/p>\n

For some time I was occupied by coding intro sequence that contained 6 g2f pictures and some story texts:<\/p>\n