I found a great online development environment for the Atari 2600 console at 8bitworkshop.com. I noticed the URL while skimming through a book on Amazon entitled Making Games for the Atari 2600, by Steven Hugg.
There are a lot of great code examples on the site, but the most useful thing about it, IMO, us the fact that your code is compiled and executed as you type. Being able to instantly see the result of your changes is incredibly convenient. Also useful is the timing calculations that the site can do on your code. If you want to do any tinkering with Atari 2600 code, be sure to check that site out.
As for my castle program, I did some more work on it over the weekend. I tightened up the castle drawing code a little bit and made the castle a little taller. I also got rid of the shading on the grass for now; I want to save as many cpu cycles as possible for the time being. The colors are a bit dark and need to be tweaked, but I’ll do that once I have actually sprites moving around so I can get a better sense of what colors will work best.
In the screen shot above you can also see a ballista in the castle courtyard. This is going to be the player. It doesn’t actually do anything yet, but eventually the player will able to move the ballista left or right within the castle walls.
Once player sprite motion is implemented I’ll work on making it shoot arrows up at the sky. I have some animation frames drawn for the firing of the ballista which I hope to be able to add in as well.
I came up with a ton of ideas to add to the game over the weekend as well, including different enemy types, power-ups, difficulty settings and even a possible boss battle. If I don’t lose interest too soon, I think I can make a pretty enjoyable game out of all this.
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