There are times like these where I'm glad bAtari BASIC exists.

it's strangly addicting in a way, it's kidna like that annoying car game everyone hates (swerve between lanes to avoid obstacles) but having to press the button at the right time while doing it and making sure to not cross the line as the wrong animal actually gives it...well...gameplay...and a point over those type of games. A little more sprite art for the stuff trying to murder you would have been nice though.

Thanks! Unfortunately, technical constraints make it basically impossible for the obstacles to look any better than they do; the 2600 only has two hardware sprites. The obstacles are drawn with the "playfield" register, and they're 1 "playfield pixel" wide.

There might be tricks that would make things look better, but they'd require me to write a custom display kernel in hand-tuned 6502 assembly. We are talking about counting processor cycles so that you can strobe hardware registers at the exact moment when the electron gun of the TV is in the right place. And that's something I'm not about to try to do in 48 hours :)

ahh, ok, don't know much about the internals of the 2600, started with the c64 myself, i know i've seen other 2600 games do it. Sounds a lot like the kind of things you do on other systems with hardware sprite limits though, partial frame updates in multiple cycles since you can only draw a few sprites per cycle.

My Harmony cart and 2600 are at the office. I'll fire it up today and post a video for you. :)

Atari?

This game is sick. It's better than half the Ludum Dare games I've played AND you made it for the 2600. Hell yeah man.

I love this!