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
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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.