For the benefit of those who like a little lore with their repro goodness, here's some information that Zzap (James) was kind enough to impart!
Chunkout 2Aim of the game:Chunkout
2 is a puzzle game where the aim of the game is to delete areas of
tiles that are the same colour and shape. The bigger the chunk, the
more points you get! As you delete chunks the tiles above them fall
down. You can delete smaller chunks to create larger ones by lining up
the colours of the tiles.
Background:I
created the first Chunkout game for the Gameboy Colour in 1999. It was
for a development/backup cartridge manufacturer called Bung in Hong
Kong who was running a competition (I think to promote the positive
aspects of their otherwised illegally perceived products). I ended up
winning a writable cartridge for my efforts on that game. A copy of the
Gameboy Colour rom can be downloaded at
http://pdroms.org/files/396/-------------------
Herein follows a brief conversation James and I had regarding his new creative effort!
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NA: First off, I'd
like to know a bit more about the history of Chunkout 2 - the
competition you mentioned sounds really interesting. Do you have pics
of the writable cart as well as any other tournament materials? How did you get hooked up with Bung? (that sounds funny)ZZ: It
was the '2nd International Game Coding Competition' run by Bung in
1999. They were well known in the Gameboy coding community at the time
for developing the relatively cheap writable cartridges, and really
were trying to push their non-nefarious uses of the cartridges. The
were copping a lot of heat from Nintendo at the time for the gameboy
writeable cartridges. In the end Nintendo won out against Bung as they
were forced to dissolve the company in March 2000, only to reemerge as
First Union Technology.
Here's a pic of the writable cartridge from Bung as well as the original cartridge I made myself that took an eprom.
http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x165/Zzap_photo/chunkout/... And here's a copy of the coding competition website with all the entries:
http://defaced.co.uk/bung/GBCodingCompetition/2ndGBCodingCom... And the wikipedia entry on Bung:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bung_EnterprisesNA: The
game looks super, this is one of my favorite Megatouch games lol. Could you talk about the gameplay a bit?ZZ: Alright, lets see how I can go....
With
my first game I decided to approach it as a black box style of game,
just simple fun gameplay with the challenge of the high-score to beat.
Chunkout 2 provides 3 levels of difficulty that introduce different
number of colours and shapes to make it more difficult to get a large
score. While the gameplay area remains the same size, the larger
variation of types of tiles makes it harder to create large chunks. If
you delete all of the tiles on the screen (a Chunkout!) you receive a
bonus. Each time you play the layout of the tiles is randomly
generated, so each game will be different.
NA: Some
personal notes are good too - what's your professional programming
history? Why do this in your spare time? Why this particular game? And
ther ever-important: what's next?ZZ: I
started coding at the ripe young age of 4 on a Commodore Vic-20. My
grandfather had said at the time that he wanted me to do more with the
computer than just play games. This progressed soon after to a
Commodore 64 which kept me entertained copying code out of books and
magazine to play for many years. Progressing from there I did a bit of
stuff on the Amiga, Mac Classic and then finally PC. At University I
completed a Bachelor of Software Engineering and have been working for
a local IT consulting company for the past 5 years.
I do this in
my spare time as I quite enjoy the simplistic architecture of the NES,
which is very reminiscent of the Commodore 64. While it's simple on the
surface, the trickyness comes into play when you need to play within
the boundaries of the hardware itself. Too many modern languages try
to remove these boundaries, so they let you get away with anything,
and it all becomes too easy. Where's the fun in that?
Next up will be something set in space...more details to come in the coming months!
NA: I'm
curious, since I've been thinking about programming the DDR game for
the NES, how different the code for the GB/GBC and the NES are?
There's a couple of gameboy DDR games and if I could get my hands on
the rom/source I wonder how much work it would take to adapt.ZZ: The
gameboy colour is actually graphically more advanced than the NES, but
they ultimately have a similar architecture. The difference is there is
a good C compiler for the gameboy and quite good libraries. I'd suggest
that it may be possible to rip the graphics out of the gameboy version,
but it may be easiest just to start from scratch with the actual game.
Perhaps if the source is written in C it may be useful as a starter for
some of the games logic.
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And here's some bonus content to whet your appetite. Now what are you waiting for, go buy one!!!
Screenshots:Title - http://home.iprimus.com.au/jamestodd/chunkout2/title.pngIn game -
http://home.iprimus.com.au/jamestodd/chunkout2/game.pngHigh score screen -
http://home.iprimus.com.au/jamestodd/chunkout2/high.pngAND last but not least, where you can buy one CHEAP!
http://www.retrousb.com/index.php...
