Spectrum Computing

Hi, I'd like to share my first ZX Spectrum release: Super Serif Bros!



Features!

• ASCII graphics
• No colour or sound

How to play!

• QAOP to move, R to restart
• Collect all the £ to open the exit
• You die if you fall off the level or touch something deadly

ASCII graphics weren't much of a thing on the Speccy, but I wanted to do something I knew I would finish, and not having any graphics at all helped a lot with that.

More info & download: http://foon.uk/ssb-spectrum/
Direct link to .tap file (14K): http://foon.uk/ssb-spectrum/ssb.tap

Hey, that’s pretty neat! Love the idea. Especially love the choice of Garamond.
14K, though—that’s pretty hefty. What did you use to code this?

Thanks! I do like that font.

I wrote all the code in assembly and it's quite small — most of the file size is the levels. They weigh in at about 12K because they're just full 32x24 screens of ASCII characters stored uncompressed. I figured there wasn't much point being any cleverer than that as long as it all still fit on a 48k Spectrum. I'm sure even the stupidest RLE would do great things to that file size (but of course would also make the levels load more slowly).

rogual wrote: ↑Wed Sep 19, 2018 10:16 pm I wrote all the code in assembly and it's quite small — most of the file size is the levels.

Oh, I see. Some simple RLE decoding can be very, very quick, actually. You could have just two algorithms—one for spaces and one for the “#” signs, and then manually chose which one to use (or whether to use both) for each level.

I use it for relatively large graphics, and it can be pretty snappy if optimized well.

Still, a great game! Had a few more goes at it, but I suck at QAOP games, unfortunately. I’m a 67890 (Sinclair joystick) guy.

Top stuff! We hardly see this kind of game anymore, so it feels especially fresh.

Congrats on your first Speccy release.

(Sending you a PM by the way)

14k? I'm not downloading that!

Love the idea. It opens a whole world of posibilities!

Ast A. Moore wrote: ↑Wed Sep 19, 2018 10:43 pm Had a few more goes at it, but I suck at QAOP games, unfortunately. I’m a 67890 (Sinclair joystick) guy.

Wow! That's weird!

Great game! Haven't played the original but it's certainly a new idea on the Spectrum. And for 2K of code there's a lot of different mechanics in there.

That final screen though... I had to load a single snapshot because I accidentally fell down after escaping! Arrghh!

If you got RLE working then I'm sure it could work well as a ZX81 game

Juan F. Ramirez wrote: ↑Thu Sep 20, 2018 6:40 am Love the idea. It opens a whole world of posibilities!

Ast A. Moore wrote: ↑Wed Sep 19, 2018 10:43 pm Had a few more goes at it, but I suck at QAOP games, unfortunately. I’m a 67890 (Sinclair joystick) guy.

Wow! That's weird!

Heh. I know. Back in the day, I didn’t have a joystick interface. QAOP didn’t stick with me, but through trial and error I figured out that if I selected the Sinclair Joystick/Interface II option, the controls were mapped to the number keys. The Spectrum was my first computer, so I hadn’t developed any preferences for game control.

To this day, even in modern games on modern platforms, I’ve been redefining controls to 67890. My fingers naturally gravitate to that position. I could very well be the only person on the planet with that particular quirk.

A very entertaining game. Thanks for releasing it.

Instead of RLE, if I was using BASIC I'd store the levels as a series of lines or rectangles to be plotted.
That way you can still edit the data by hand but it usually works out much smaller than a screen's worth of bytes.

Very cool game!
I'm loving 'discovering' the rules!