Last Saturday was the deadline for the Reset64 4K Craptastic Game Competition. Make a Commodore 64 game which is no more than 4096 bytes (when loaded into the computer).

After delivering Kung Fu Pixel (about which I still haven’t written anything) I needed a cooldown, did some goofing around with making a SID from the game.

But the C64 game fever started acting up again and I knew I had a simple idea lying around so I did another game for the compo mentioned above.

It’s called Parking Assist Chicken (I didn’t really think about that title hard enough, it should have been Parking Assistant , or Parking Assisted Chicken), oh well.

Two cars playing a game of chicken in reverse with only their Parking Assist Beeps to guide them. The idea was you could play it blind, so the game wouldn’t need any graphics and could be done pretty easily.
Of course I couldn’t resist making graphics. I animated the title (at first with random elements, but that would go wrong 10% of the times I built it).

And I also added some in-game sprites

Friday I decided the game was good enough to enter (but certainly not good enough to win). I will work on it some more later, there are some bugs left and the balancing could be better.

All in all it was a fun challenge. I had to ‘reverse’ my programming strategies I picked up with Kung Fu Pixel:

• With Kung Fu Pixel speed was everything, so there was loads of ‘speed code’ and look up tables and minimizing the use of loops. Kernal and Basic were turned off.
• With Parking Assist Chickens I had to use all kind of tricks I never used before in C64 assembly, like printing using Basic Routines, Kernal routines and looping a lot. Tables were generated not included. I generated the font based on the original (not as creatively as I would have liked).

I had a plan to use the in-game sound effects for making music, but that would have taken too much time.So I used a Sid tune by my good friend Roel Noorman. It was the smallest Goat tracker I had of him, but it still took more than 1K out of my 4K total. But adding graphics and a weird intro thing that cost even more space.

I heard the tune A LOT during development and I still like it, so it must be good ;).

I have no idea how much fun it is to play, because I didn’t have the opportunity to test it with someone else and it is a strictly two person game.

I won’t fall into a C64-less gap after this, because there are other things I’m working on

• A full screen version of Dance Dance Kung Fu Pixel with all in-game tunes using the Kung Fu Pixel Engine(pretty much finished, but I’m thinking about texts and some small tuneing of colors and effects).
• Adding the dance sequence to the winning screen in Kung Fu Pixel.
• Finish the intro for the Willow Pattern recrack and write about it some more.
• Find a method to use the original Kung Fu Pixel code to run the game in a browser or on a mobile device (the graphics won’t be a problem, sound wise I’m still working that out).

And I had another idea for a 4K C64 game that was too ambitious for 2 weeks but is totally doable in a year 🙂

My game and a lot more can be found here:

https://reset64-magazine.itch.io/2018-reset64-4kb-craptastic-game-compo