SpeccyJam Anyone?

[MrPlow]

Was asked if I wanted to do something for this...anyone else interested?

www.speccyjam.com


Some of the rules

— You have one week to create your game, the Speccy Jam dates will be announced on the front page.

— You can use absolutely any tool or game engine to create your game, and it can be developed for any device or platform (Web game, flash game, iOS / Android, PC, Mac… anything you want! It’s entirely up to you) but the finished game must have the feel of a ZX Spectrum game and follow the rules.

— The game must have a resolution of 256 × 192 …. but you can upscale this so your game looks much larger and retains the correct resolution (giving it the “pixelated” look).

— You must only use the below 15 colours (you don’t have to use them all, but you can not use any other colours)

[MrTAToad]

The Spectrum was one machine I never really programmed on!

[MrPlow]

Hi MrTAToad

The rules are u can develop in any language: basic, c#, html5, etc - but the game end result should look very speccy-like...so speccy coding expertise is not a requirement

[Hark0]

Long life to ZX Spectrum hardware! 

[matchy]

The Jet Set F'n Willy machine rocks! 

[mentalthink]

MrT seems programming a Sinclair in ASM was really hard, seems the ClashColor, the effect when colors mixed, avoid this "problem" was really hard.

Thanks for the post, I thinked sometimes to do soemthink like Spectrum or Amstrad, but I don't have any idea to make this kind of graphics, I only come to my Head use Blender and Voxelize each Polygon of a mesh.

IF anyone want program a real Spectrum today or in Emulator, I read very good thigs about Boriel Compiler, it's a Basic written in Python and seems you can do nice things.

[erico]

I´d love to take part on this jam, specially to research the speccy way of visuals...unfortunantly time dictates I either work on my game or this, so this will have to wait...

[Hark0]

Hi!

Try to write REAL code for ZX... with only 42 Kb of ram free... with only 4 mhz cpu speed... only 8 colors... low resolution... no multitask...

IT'S "MAGIC"!!! 

[matchy]

Yo. I used to dabble BASIC on my friend's Spectrum in the 80s so I got the jive but never since then in an emulator, unlike coco, which I should try I suppose. 

[MrTAToad]

I have never really liked Z80 assembler - I suppose it's mainly because I used 6510

[MrPlow]

I think Z80 code is beyond me ... *time-wise*

I could do something in Sinclair Basic and compile it to speed it up but still have it run it emulator...but I think a lot of peeps in the jam will be building to run on PC etc., so I might stick to GLBASIC.

I will try simulate colour clash and the real zx resolution etc...

All I need now is a good concept!

[erico]

So you are taking part! Nice, let us know how it goes and point us toward a possible page of progress in case this jam uses such.
Good luck!

I believe the pallete and color restrictions might be easy to deal, the clash on the other hand, may be a bit too much over my head, maybe ALPHAMODE could help on this front?

[spacefractal]

the hardest part is eventuelly colour clash, if you want very strict. A issue which was not that a problem on Commodore 64 (which have other issues instead).

Im created music for Manic Miner The Lost levels DS remake, which we also used some spectrum levels as its was. Here its did not simulate colour clash on those levels.

for the clash, you cant uses ALPHAMODE to very much.

[Wampus]

Simulating the colour limitations of the speccy is an interesting idea. Also, getting music to sound like its using an AY-3-8912 chip is an interesting challenge. I think there are tools to do that out there.

I'm already doing a jam in August. This does look fun though.

[Wampus]

The rules state the resolution must be 256x192. I would love to work with twice that! 256x192 is so small.

Found a useful tool. It takes an image and makes it look like a spectrum screen image: http://silentdevelopment.blogspot.ca/2009/05/image-to-zx-spec-10-released.html

I played with it for a few minutes going back between photoshop and the tool. Produced this attempt at a Bruce Lee title screen:-