Alien easter cat

You play Alien Cat who wants to get home in time for Easter. But he has to travel trough the dangerous Dog Nebula and defeat or evade enemies and bullits.

At the start of the game he can choose how to outfit his spaceship. As a cat he has 9 lives which he can trade for credit with which he can buy bullitpacks and shields. The idea is, you can buy the stuff to fit your preferred playing style.

The game was made in 3 days in 6502 assembly. All code and graphics were made in those 3 days. Most of the time was spent in debugging, though :)

The music was made a few years before by Roel and is used with his permission. He also made the few sound effects the game has. The Cat character is based on an idea by Ingeborg.

Because I spend so many time on a few stubborn bugs, I didn't have time to tweak the gameplay, so the game is not balanced. Lucky for you that means it's a very easy game.

The game has no restart facility (which isn't that bad, because at the moment replay value is pretty limited) (just rerun or press F5 if playing in a browser).

Controls

On a C64, you need a joystick in port 1. On the Vice emulator or the first mentioned online emulator: Use keys on the Numpad and Space. (8=up, 2=down, 4=left, 6=right, SPACE=fire). If you have downloaded an emulator yourself (like Vice), you may have to change the joystick settings. * In the buying menu use up and down to select, left and right to decrease or increase amount. Fire to fly off * In-game Up activates shield, down deactivates shield, left and right for steering and fire to fire your bullits.

The playing field uses only the leftmost 256 pixels (which is considered a bit of a cop-out in C64 circles).

Running the game

The best way to play it would be on a Real C64, but that would be difficult for most people. Second best is an emulator running on an Desktop or Laptop. Running the game in a browser demands a decent Desktop/Laptop. Running on a mobile in the browser is not adviced.

An emulator that is available for Windows, Mac and Linux is VICE. Link to the VICE site: (http://vice-emu.sourceforge.net/index.html#download). You can drag the game file 'main.prg' on the executable to run the game. You may have to change the joystick settings in the menu. The game uses joystick in Port 1. I've also included a zipped windows version that is stripped to just the C64 emulator and has a batch file that you can click to run the game (it does the joystick setting for you).

If you don't like to download an emulator or can't use that version, there are online options:

Playing Online

• https://ib-goerp.nl/c64/emulated/ Chrome demands some user interaction before AudioContext is allowed to start. Therefore you must click the button below to start the program. After clicking the script will be loaded and the game will automatically start.

This online version emulates a C64 with Vice.js, which is made by R. Janicek link to a demo sitelink to the repo. Vice.js is a javascript port of the great Vice EmulatorLink to the VICE site.

I changed the settings of Vice.js so it emulates joystick port 1 using the Numpad Keys. According to Vice documentation, the Numpad '0' key should work as Fire button, but on my computer it didn't work, so I changed the game so it would use Joystick in port 1 and set Vice to emulate that joystick port on the numpad. That way the SPACE key can be used as fire (who would have thought that the C64's crosstalk between joystick and keyboard would come in handy 37 years later, he?).

• https://c64emulator.111mb.de/index.php?site=pp_javascript&lang=en&group=c64 It's another good online emulator Download the game from the Ludum Dare page, and upload it to the emulator page (on the drop file and play, part). Set Joystick in the dropdown to 'Joystick Keyboard 2-> Player2' to be able to use Cursor keys and Space to control the ship.

Version

I've made three changes since the first upload: I changed the joystick port so I could get it to run online and I fixed two major bugs: * a bug that always changed the lifes you had at the start to 9 (therby defeating the whole idea of the game) * a bug that prevented enemies turning up (making the game even MORE boring).

Bugs left

There are still plenty of bugs left. A few notable bugs: * score isn't working * collision detection with enemies isn't working * enemies freeze from time to time * you can't see how for you've progressed

If you've found another bug, please let me know in the comments