geoGlyph
geoGlyph has been a long-time goal of mine - to make a Bejeweled-type game for GEOS for the Commodore 64/128 computer. The game is so simple it should have been written originally for those machines, except of course it didn't come out until much later than the Commodore 8-bit heyday.
I was working on geoBots, a Robots game for GEOS, but the collision code was causing me so many headaches I never thought I'd get it done. So while banging my head against the proverbial wall trying to figure out an efficient simultaneous collision algorithm for those Robots, I had the idea to do geoGlyph.
This is not an unusual pattern for me. When I first took it upon myself to write a whole game in Assembler, I came up with geoMimic, a simple Simon game. I got stuck coding it. Playing back the sequence never worked right. So I gave it up in frustration, when a better project idea came along. geoComix. A much more complex program. While totally dedicated to programming geoComix, I learned enough that by the time I was finished, I was able to go back to geoMimic, find the problem and have it running in about an hour. Which allowed me to polish it and ship it.
I seem to be repeating that process. But hey, whatever works, right?
First, I thought it would be difficult, but as I started thinking about it, it seemed to get easier and easier. To prove my concept I wrote a BASIC program that drew a random screen full of glyphs, did the color matching, then the glyph removal and cascading collapses in a loop, and tested it throughly.
The result should be a very playable GEOS game based on Bejeweled, but with some of my own game-play twists thrown in.
I was determined, since it was such a small game, to make it a small Desk Accessory, much like geoMimic. Here is a preliminary idea of what it would look like.
Until the project is finished, this page will mostly point to a Developer's Diary, where I keep track of the project and how it's going. When the project is complete, this page will be filled out with final screenshots and information on how to play. But for now:
I've been updating this page every few days, whenever I feel some progress was made, and the game is now almost finished, feature-wise. The next phase will be to recruit a few dedicated Beta Testers. If you wish to volunteer, please use the e_mail button below and let me know. Thanks!
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