[Coco] Curious game no coco

[Roger Taylor]

At 02:28 PM 4/14/2011, you wrote:
>Looking over the game play, the Scrolling effect could be done on 
>the CoCo 3 but would take two screen buffers of 68k each.  (This is 
>like the scrolling effect in the game Marty's Nightmare, but you 
>would need the infinite screen scroll to get the height of a level 
>in the game.)
>
>The water effect is from many small blocks that act like water.  The 
>logic looks simple...
>
>When a water block hits something in path, it looks for a new "open" 
>direction to travel.  Each new direction is weighted with how likely 
>the water would flow that way with a bit of randomness.  The water 
>block picks the most weighted direction from the list and moves that way.
>
>This type of logic is easy for the CoCo to do for 10 or 20 water 
>blocks on the level.  But this game has hundreds (if not 1000's) 
>water blocks that would slow the game to just a few frames per 
>second.  (Not very playable.)
>
>This is another case of game design that had to wait for a more 
>power computer then those made back in the 80's.
>
>Steve


That's only one way of coding the water behavior.  One could also use 
predefined/precomputed water paths.  Looking at the game I can see 
drops falling at the same speed but spaced out randomly, yet all 
appearing to be following a certain path.  I don't see any drops 
bouncing in random directions.

-- 
~ Roger Taylor