Armagetron is going to the Nintendo Switch!

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Z-Man
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Armagetron is going to the Nintendo Switch!

Post by Z-Man »

Of course it does! Everything is moving there.

Sadly, Nintendo rejected the proposal to make Armagetron 99 the next Switch Online free title, so I went for the next best thing: Start implementing it in FUZE. If you don't know what that is, oh boy! It's a happy news day for you. FUZE for Nintendo Switch, of F4NS, is a game development environment that completely runs on the Switch, it has a code editor (of course), pixel image editor and map (tile or freeeform) editor and comes with a expansive library of artwork ready to use.
(There is also Smile Basic, very similar, but uses an uglier dialect of BASIC. One were GOTO and GOSUB are things, and functions have easy to memorize names like SPHITSP. It definitely has its qualities, for example it's faster, but I like nice looking code.)
So yeah. In order to play Armagetron on your Switch, you currently need the full FUZE app. It's reasonably priced!
Once you have that app, go to "Programs", pick "Download by ID" (Y button) and enter

Code: Select all

NXKLK1NB51
In the not too distant future, you should get away with only getting the FUZE PLAYER, that one is capable of only running, not editing games, and only those in the showcase gallery where this is not yet in. It's not available everywhere, and for some reason, I can't find the main FUZE thing on Nintendo's website.

Anyway, what this does support, kind of awkwardly at the moment, is playing Sumo with up to eight people with eight JoyCon things. Less players if you use full controllers. There also are bots. And while they're not too smart and don't even attack, at least they know about the shrinking circle. Here, have a quick look:

Twitter link

The display is always shared screen, splitscreen would be possible. Maybe I'll look into it later, but I fear there will be performance issues.

The chief tester, which would be Z-Girl, complained that the two button controls are confusing, so the very next thing I'll do is support control over the sticks. The plan is to use context sensitive thresholds; see, even for human players, I already gather proximity data of the immediate surroundings, so I imagine one can get an effect superior to rubber by making the sticks more sensitive to turns as you are about to crash and less sensitive for turns that would send you straight into a wall.

The next thing would be a proper menu system.

Also interesting is the performance optimization approach I took. FUZE is way too simplistic to implement any kind of spatial ordering for the walls without going insane, so they are all just in one big array. And out of that array, each cycle periodically picks nearby walls for a collision cache, and then only uses that for individual raycasts. Works quite well!

The very big advantage this has over PC Armagetron, of course, is that FUZE does not support any kind of networking. So no need to worry about that and all that brings, no chat, no spam filter, no player management, no matchmaking, none of that bother. And isn't local play nicer anyway? Imagine, instead of sitting in your lonely room, you could invite seven friends over for an Armagetron Party! Or, given that the Switch is mobile, why not take it down to the local pub, plonk it down, play, and watch a crowd gather around you? And when someone finally musters the courage to ask whether they can play, too, sure they can, and you produce your six spare JoyCons from your bag.
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sinewav
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Re: Armagetron is going to the Nintendo Switch!

Post by sinewav »

Can't tell if it's a prank, but this is amazing. I wish I owned a Switch so I can find out for sure! If not, the animation in your tweet is great.
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Re: Armagetron is going to the Nintendo Switch!

Post by syllabear »

:lol:

check the date sine
The Halley's comet of Armagetron.
ps I'm not tokoyami
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Re: Armagetron is going to the Nintendo Switch!

Post by sinewav »

syllabear wrote: Thu Apr 01, 2021 10:31 am :lol:

check the date sine
Yeah Yeah I know, but the animation is really convincing. I want to know how it was created. I'm an artist you know.
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Re: Armagetron is going to the Nintendo Switch!

Post by Z-Man »

Heh :) As per usual, the game is real. Also as per usual, not really a port of Armagetron, just some new lightcycle game. I do intend to turn this into a simple, complete game. The bits about Armagetron 99 and praise of local play were fake.

Yeah, there really are two distinct apps on the Switch that let you write your own games. I only learned about Smile Basic a month or so back and it was on sale, so I grabbed it then... haven't done any work with it myself. But FUZE is really nice. It wasn't too recommendable back when it came out, but very recently, they published a patch that made it quite a joy to program with. They now have search (and replace) in the editor, and when your program crashes, you get a callstack, not just the one error location. It's an interpreted dynamically typed language without any form of indirect code execution (no callbacks, function pointers, virtual functions). So you get functions, arrays, structs, all of the usual loops; native types are just integer (64 bit), float, string, and 4-vector (used for colors and coordinates). Once you get used to that simplicity, writing code flows really well. If you do it right (have a DEBUG mode that doesn't load as much of the assets and jumps you straight into the bits that you want to test), your edit-test-fix-test cycle is as tight as it can be.

It is pretty limited in its capabilities, mind. You only have, depending on how you use it, one or a handful of MB of usable memory for variables. You only get ONE source file and ONE data storage file (for savegames and highscores) per project, so there is a natural complexity limit. For 3D graphics, you can use objects from their library. There is no 3D object editor. Any custom geometry you want needs to be pieced together with existing models, boxes, ellipsoids, wedges and cones. Of course, that's pretty much perfect for a lightcycle :) Oh yeah, no textures either, so the grid lines are actual long boxes. For 2D graphics, the tools are adequate, though. You can draw your own images and animations and compose them into maps.
You also can't define your own sounds, there's no import of anything from a PC, and no music editor. If you want custom music, you have to program it based on individual sounds.
It's also leaky and crashes a lot if you do something unexpected. Well formed programs run fine, though.

All of those limitations are all right in my eyes. The thing is meant to be more a learning tool, teaching kids to code, than a 'maek ur own awsm gaem!' environment. I very much like it. If you limit your scope and ambitions early on, you can make great, simple games. For example "Da Bean". You're a bean jumping along a path of cubes layed out in 3d. You can either jump down or up, only one choice is right, the other leads to instant doom. And that's it, see how far you get. It's super addictive :) There's a screenshot on the store page linked above.
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Re: Armagetron is going to the Nintendo Switch!

Post by sinewav »

Thanks for the fascinating write-up, I knew this was no ordinary prank. The animation on your Twitter was too good and there is no way you would have it made for a joke. Looks fun! I'll have to become better friends with my co-worker that has a switch so we can play when the pandemic is over, heh. :star:
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Re: Armagetron is going to the Nintendo Switch!

Post by Z-Man »

It has recently been added to the showcase gallery, so it's now available in the cheap player app:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlU9BQ8zGK8
However, the showcase gallery browser apparently can't handle too many apps and was unusable after the addition for a couple of days. They now switched to a rotating system where only 10 games are shown every week.

The other game I made with additional level design by Z-Girl also made it in, it's the short and tough single screen platformer "Ninja Gal". The gimmick: The code of the original version also fits on a single screen. The code for the showcase version has been reformatted for clarity with better variable names for educational purposes. That project was a lot of fun and I think it turned out quite well. Here is basically all of it in video form, including all of the code (which heavily abuses the fact that, even though there is no statement end separator like C's semicolon, you can nevertheless cram as many as you like into a single line):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdA4_SDvTyo
For projects like this, they have a quite usable map and sprite system. You can edit the map graphics and functionality independently, so nowhere did I have to program that spikes, the abyss and lava are deadly, you just mark the areas accordingly. Sprite and map are rendered in the same coordinate system, so you don't have to worry about that when zooming or scrolling. And of course there are direct sprite-map collision functions, so you can just concentrate on the bits that matter for gameplay.
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Re: Armagetron is going to the Nintendo Switch!

Post by sinewav »

Ninja Gal! That was surprisingly engaging to watch. Great job on the level design, lots of variety. I like the background too, is it a pre-built asset or did you or Z-Girl draw it?
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Re: Armagetron is going to the Nintendo Switch!

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The "art" visible in the video is all by myself; Z-Girl made the surprise bonus vacation level that comes after the bit in the video. There are plenty of assets available that would have made it a more beatutiful game, but a) I wanted it to be as much our own as possible and b) I figured with the basic gameplay and animation system, the graphics should also be simple. The paint tool is a bit crap, they only added bucket fill in an update that came too late to be useful :) So when I decided an area needed a different color, I carefully had to repaint it by hand. I did that only once. The background is an adaption of this image of Mount Fuji.

The sounds are stock sounds. It's possible to make your own effects, but only with classic, C64/NES style methods. You can start with sinewav, squarewav, sawtoothwav, trianglewav and whitenoisewav, add an envelope, filters and another wave for modulation. But that would have taken too much code.

Yeah, most of the development time probably went into designing the levels. Z-Girl's levels are the ones where the blue arrow marks the exit, they have a nice consistent difficulty considering they were indeed designed to be togehter. For the rest, I cheated and made the levels first, then reordered them in rough order of difficulty :)
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Re: Armagetron is going to the Nintendo Switch!

Post by sinewav »

Z-Man wrote: Mon Dec 13, 2021 10:33 pm...So when I decided an area needed a different color, I carefully had to repaint it by hand....It's possible to make your own effects, but only with classic, C64/NES style methods. You can start with sinewav, squarewav, sawtoothwav, trianglewav and whitenoisewav, add an envelope, filters and another wave for modulation. But that would have taken too much code.
Ha, that's exactly the kind of challenge I like. Makes me think I should get serious about programming again. I haven't written any code in over a year.
Z-Man wrote: Mon Dec 13, 2021 10:33 pmZ-Girl's levels are the ones where the blue arrow marks the exit, they have a nice consistent difficulty considering they were indeed designed to be togehter.
This was the most interesting part. I felt that if you died on screen 3 of 4 you should have to go back to the 1st screen again, at least that's sort of the convention. And going with convention, progressive sequences would be both more difficult and have more screens before completing the level. Of course, that's all too much work for a game like this. Still, it looks like a fun time waster for an afternoon!
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Re: Armagetron is going to the Nintendo Switch!

Post by Z-Man »

sinewav wrote: Tue Dec 14, 2021 8:00 pm Ha, that's exactly the kind of challenge I like.
Well, the paint thing is exactly the kind of challenge I don't like :) The one where there is just unavoidable friction that slows you down.
sinewav wrote: Tue Dec 14, 2021 8:00 pm I felt that if you died on screen 3 of 4 you should have to go back to the 1st screen again, at least that's sort of the convention. And going with convention, progressive sequences would be both more difficult and have more screens before completing the level.
It's the convention for a certain subgenre aptly named "Punishers", yes. They have their place, but I personally am not a fan. I never like it when games force you to repeat sections longer than a couple of seconds over and over until you beat a harder bit at the end. I normally finish games I start (*), but I put down some otherwise great games because of their harsh failure conditions:
* Bit Trip Beat has super long levels, arount 20 minutes? It allows multiple mistakes and you can recover from them, but make too many and it's back to the very start, no checkpoints.
* Bit Trip Runner sends you back to the start (or maybe it has mid-level checkpoints, but a finite number of retries?) on any mistake, and the timing requirements get harsh. I had to give up two levels to the end. In the game's and my defense, I only had a 30ms response time LCD to play it on.
* Völgar the Viking. Long levels, has one checkpoint in the middle and a super hard boss at the end. Fail at the boss, back to the middle checkpoint. I guess their excuse is that you start with basic equipment and slowly gear up over the course of play, all set up so you can get to full gear by the time you get to the boss, but dammit, then just let me practice against the boss with full equipment.

Also, not on the list because I dislike it for other reasons, The Witness is a puzzle game that forces you to dedo previous puzzles if you fail later ones. I bailed out of that one early. I get angry just thinking about it.

Anyway, Ninja Gal is hard enough without throwing you back some screens on death, the victims said :)

(*) Clarification: By "finish", I mean "get to the end credits/story resolution". I almost never engage with the optional stuff that unlocks after that to any meaningful extent.
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