ChibiAkumas ASM Programming Forum

Hello everyone,

I just finished a new project, which was to make a real time shooter game. It's called Reverse Direction and it's a clone of a well known game from 1978

Really was fun to try and wrap my head around a proper game loop, handle animation frames, slow the game down to run at exactly 24 FPS, regardless of how much work was done in each gameloop.

I'll be adding sound to the game at some point. I'm still trying to understand how to access the sound functionality in the Commander X16, but i'll get there.

If anyone is interested, the source files, assets and a build binary are in the attachments below. Just run it on the Commander X16's emulator version r37 and have fun. Press Return to start a level, arrow keys to move sideways and Ctrl to fire a missile. Try not to get killed!

Really great work!... I got to level 7

the gameplay is really well done... it feels as good as an authentic space invaders game in the movement and collision detection.

I like the enemies too... they're cute and look funny!... Do they have names like in pacman?

Hi Keith, thanks!

And well, no official names as such. I call them: 'red apple dude', 'blue blob' and 'green squid'. But you won't find those names in the source code

There's also not much difference between them, gameplay wise. Only the red apple dude's fire lasers down at you, but apart from the looks, they have identical collision ranges.

And i'm happy you enjoyed playing Each level has a few more enemies then the last, but there's only 10 levels and then it wraps back to level 1. Though if you wanted, you can easily add a ton more levels with very minimal code changes and a few more lookup tables

I have to admit to taking inspiration from Y-Quest for the game logic. I'm sure someone with a bit more experience can rebuild the game with less then 3000 lines of code, but i'm still proud I was able to pull it off