StarGiraf

StarGiraf is an Atari 2600 space shooter featuring a mutant Giraffe with an incredibly long neck and the ability to shoot lasers. So it's definitively the "perfect beast" for space!

How to play

- Use arrow keys to move around, and avoid getting hit by the flying enemies.

- Press "X" to shoot lasers (you can hold down the button for continuous fire)

About

This game was made in a week for the "Jeff Minter x Atari Game Jam". The goal was to make a game in the style of the talented Jeff Minter on the theme "A Perfect Beast". As Jeff Minter is known for his excellent arcade / space shooter games with abstract and colorful visuals, I started to think about what could "a perfect beast" be in such a setting. And who has an higher reach than a giraffe? No one! Obviously we need to have a mutant giraffe, so it can shoot lasers to destroy enemies. And so was born "StarGiraf", the perfect beast for arcade space battles!

I really loved the unique theme of this Jam (make a game inspired by a famous game designer), and I wanted to try to make a "Jeff Minter inspired" game on a retro machine, possibly one that Jeff Minter didn't release a game for it (yet :)). As Atari is sponsoring the Jam, and as I really love to develop games for the Atari 2600, I tried to make my best to make a "Jeff Minter-esque" Atari 2600 game.

Behind the hood

The game was programmed using batariBasic, a very powerful compiled Basic language allowing to create games for the Atari 2600. I used the very detailed and example-rich documentation by RandomTerrain, which proved very useful as it was my first time making a game using the DPC+ chip for this machine.

As the Atari 2600 can display sprites that can be as tall as the screen, it was a good fit for a very tall giraffe. Regarding challenges, the "starfield effect" is not a "regular feature" of the Atari 2600. It's actually based on an hardware bug / undocumented feature allowing to display a graphical object many times onscreen instead of a single time. Here it uses the "Ball" object, as it's possible to change its color every few scanline to create a "rainbow starfield" effect. This hardware trick was created by RevEng, and I thank him a lot for sharing it with the community. Here the game uses the "DPC+" variant, that is compatible with all the Atari 2600 models.

The DPC+ chip also offer some extra processing power enable another "Minter-esque" effect: the stretching messages displayed onscreen to congratulate and tease the player. The text messages are displayed using the Playfield, a regular feature of the Atari 2600. The DPC+ ease the "stretching" effect. And as the playfield colors are already changed every few scanlines to display the rainbow starfield, the same color gradient is also applied to the text messages.