Atari 2600 Game Design Rejuvenation
Personal guidelines and player advocacy.
Opinion page by Duane Alan Hahn, a.k.a. Random Terrain.
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Page Table of Contents
Below are my personal thoughts and guidelines for making Atari 2600 games. I've been slowly working on them since 1982. Although this page was made with Atari 2600 games in mind, a lot of it can be applied to all games.
Making a Game isn't About Your Ego
Making a game is about having fun, overcoming challenges, being grateful for help from better programmers, and trying to make players happy. If people have a rough day at work or school, they can sit down, play your game and get away from it all for a little while. If we can help players relieve stress and just generally feel better after playing, we've done a good job.
Everything in your game should be as user-friendly and intuitive as possible. It's your job to put everything you can on a silver platter for the player. Never let ego or laziness interfere.
Any time you start thinking more about yourself and less about the player, it's time to go out to a tree, find a good switch, and beat your ego until it's in the fetal position over in the corner of your mind.
Please do not flash the background color or the playfield color when the player receives damage or when an enemy or object of some kind is destroyed. Yes, I know that some programmers back in the 1980s flashed the screen, but programmers did a lot of stupid stuff in the 1980s. It's a lazy effect that bothers the eyes of some players, so you might as well leave it out. It doesn't matter if you think it won't cause epileptic seizures; it's still irritating. It can also cause eye pain and headaches. For me, it usually only causes eye pain, but I have gotten headaches from it.
If you want to indicate that the player received damage and you think that a sound effect isn't enough, try having a sound effect while flashing the color of the player's sprite. For something like a meteor being destroyed, have a sound effect and an explosion animation instead of flashing the screen.
If you think that you absolutely must flash the screen, try using a multicolored playfield, then quickly send a strip of light color from top to bottom and that shouldn't hurt anybody's eyes.
On a similar subject, it can also be irritating when the playfield quickly changes color in a never-ending loop. For example, a version of Pac-Man where the walls of the maze quickly change color in a continual loop would make a lot of people run from the game and never return.
Reset Switch and Fire Button = Start
I can't believe this section is needed, but a guy will come along every once in a while who thinks he's avant-garde or ever so clever and will use the Select switch or some other switch to start his game. These people who incorrectly believe that only they march to the beat of a different drummer need to understand that we can have fun expressing ourselves and being creative, but we still have to think about the player.
Every Atari 2600 game made since 1982 should start if the player presses the Reset switch or the fire button (whichever one the player chooses to use). Most players expect it, so do it. No excuses. Kill your ego and your delusions. Show that you respect and care about the player by making the controls as user-friendly and intuitive as possible.
End of Game + Fire Button = Reset Switch
Any game released after May of 1982 should start/restart using the fire button. It's more than a courtesy, it's an expected feature that was famously used in Yars' Revenge, but it was also used in games that were released earlier such as Maze Craze and Pac-Man. The joystick is essentially turned into an Atari 2600 remote control and the player can restart a game without getting up a million times. Not everyone sits on the floor, a foot away from the Atari and not everyone plays emulated games with the keyboard (some players use a controller).
You might be tempted to use the fire button to restart a game and ignore the Reset Switch. Not a good idea. It should be the player's choice. When the game ends, the player should be able to play again by pressing the fire button or the Reset Switch. It should never be one or the other. The Reset Switch is also supposed to work if the player presses it while playing a game, so make sure your games allow the player to do that.
No matter how the player chooses to restart the game, remember to have some type of short game over sequence that makes sure the player can't restart accidentally. The player will still be able to restart using the fire button, but only when he or she wants to.
If you want more than my opinion, the following is from Atari's Game Standards and Procedures:
A GAME OVER message should be displayed at the end of each player's game telling which player is out of the game. When all games in progress are over, the game freezes on the screen and the fire button is disabled for 2 seconds while the GAME OVER message is displayed. After the 2 second freeze, if the player presses the fire button, the game restarts at the same difficulty level and with the same number of players as was previously selected. If this action is not taken, after 20-30 seconds the game automatically goes to the TITLE PAGE and IDLE SEQUENCE.
Controlled Randomness should be used to place enemies, objects, bonus items, hidden rooms, platforms in a platform game (when possible), and so on to keep the game fresh. A game should be about on-the-spot decision making and pure fun, not memorization of patterns, enemy locations, or game event trigger locations that never change when the game is replayed.
Think of The Legend of Zelda with a more advanced version of the randomness in Adventure (game 3). In such a large game, use of a random seed would be necessary so the game would be the same until finished. After the player has 'beaten' the game, a new seed could be selected manually or randomly and the player would be off on a whole new adventure within the familiar framework.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Slayer is a pretty good example of a replayable game. From the back cover: "The randomized dungeon generator can create over 4 billion different dungeons — that's a new monster hunt every time you play!"
Don't give the player irritating perfect timing chores that are like playing a deadly game of laser jump rope. One tiny mistake and you're dead and usually have to go back and replay that level or a bunch of levels. Don't be like game designers who say "Dance for me monkey boy! Be perfect or die! Now do it all over again! Ha ha ha ha!" Perfect timing is usually an essential part of Die and Remember games. Yes, I know that many of the things I say go against everything you've learned over the years, but we need to stop the same old 'monkey see, monkey do' game design. We don't have to continue to make the same mistakes that other game designers have made. We can try to do better.
Check out the following from montalk.net:
"Before, it was mentioned that struggle often accompanies spiritual evolution. Struggle does not always mean pain, it simply means active application of one's will to progress and learn. As an analogy, rock climbing can be considered a struggle, but it is still fun for many who do it as a sport. When it comes to spiritual evolution, painful struggle is actually unnecessary, while fun struggle is the ideal way to evolve."
Although I tend to lean towards video 'toys' where no struggle is involved for true creative play, there's nothing wrong with fun struggle. The problem is that too many game designers and players have been brainwashed into thinking that painful struggle is the only option. For example, if you're climbing a mountain with the usual ropes and gear, then slip a little, you don't have to go back to the bottom and start all over again. Forcing players to replay entire levels for making a tiny mistake is like sending them back to the bottom of a mountain; it's painful struggle. If we focus on fun struggle, the benefit might be that players will feel good after playing instead of feeling stressed out, irritated, and ready to bite someone's head off.
Intelligent Non-Player Characters
Every non-player character should seem to be 'alive' and at least have a spark of intelligence. If a non-player character simply jumps back and forth or moves up and down, it's nothing more than a mindless obstacle. There's nothing wrong with mindless obstacles, but anything that is supposed to be alive should act like it's alive. Non-player characters don't have to be geniuses, but they should be able to see you or smell you or track you by the sounds you make. And if possible, they should have some kind of emotional reaction (fear, anger, surprise or whatever fits the game). Some non-player characters might hold a grudge if you make them angry and will come after you long after other non-player characters have moved on.
Here's a semi-related excerpt from The Making Of: IK+ (edge-online.com):
The development of IK+'s AI was, though prosaic by comparison, no less efficient. "It was easy, basically," Maclean boasts. "In those days, it wasn't even called AI—we would have called it 'fighting logic', or something. The whole thing was based on look-up tables of what moves to use based on how far away the opponent was. The game obviously knows which move, if it were used, would lead to a direct hit at that point in time. For the easy difficulty level, right at the start, the computer fighters would, 90 per cent of the time, look at what the best move would be and then ignore it. As the level of difficulty increased that percentage would drop, until level 25 or thereabouts where it would be 95 per cent accurate. It worked beautifully."
Platform Game + Fire Button = Jump
Never make the player jump by pressing up on the joystick. It's unpleasant, uncomfortable, unnatural, and unintuitive. If the character must shoot a weapon or throw things, how about having the player hold down on the joystick to switch between shoot mode and jump mode or maybe the player could press the fire button for a certain amount of time (similar to Mouse Trap)? Or what about a double tap of the fire button to jump and a single tap to shoot (or the other way around)?
Resist Frustration and Competition
Try to eliminate frustration and competition whenever possible. Frustration was a highly successful villainous tactic for getting people hooked on games and squeezing as much money out of them as possible, but a fun game without frustration is healthier for gamers. Try to focus on what is truly fun, not some perverted version of it. Most of us have come to believe that frustration and competition are essential ingredients of fun. We've been bombarded with that idea for so long that it's hard for us to see any other way, but we have to break free from these fallacies. Speaking of competition, it seems like most people are addicted to it and one way to help them move away from competition and focus on play and untainted fun is to rip out the score.
Quotes on Competition and Cooperation
Emory Brain Imaging Studies Reveal Biological Basis for Human Cooperation
Cooperative Games That Teach Solidarity
Amazon: Cooperative Games (#ad)
Max: A Cooperative Game by Family Pastimes (#ad)
Ogres and Elves: A Cooperative Game of Teamwork Strategy and Sharing (#ad)
Mr. Troll: A Co-operative Adventure Game (#ad)
Caves and Claws: A Cooperative Game of Jungle Suspense Danger and Teamwork (#ad)
The Secret Door: A Cooperative Game of Memory and Mystery (#ad)
Harvest Time: A Cooperative Game of Harvesting the Crops Before Winter Comes (#ad)
Mountaineering: A Cooperative Game of Mountain Climbing (#ad)
No Contest: The Case Against Competition (#ad)
The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest (#ad)
The Dawning Age of Cooperation: The End of Civilization as We Know It, and Just in Time (#ad)
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (#ad)
The Evolution of Cooperation (#ad)
The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (#ad)
Everyone Wins!: Cooperative Games and Activities (#ad)
Cooperative Games and Sports, Joyful Activities for Everyone (#ad)
Win-Win Games for All Ages: Co-operative Activities for Building Social Skills (#ad)
Did you know that Trump's rushed experimental rona jab has less than one percent overall benefit? It also has many possible horrible side effects. Some brainwashed rona jab cultists claim that there are no victims of the jab, but person after person will post what the jab did to them, a friend, or a family member on web sites such as Facebook and Twitter and they'll be lucky if they don't get banned soon after. Posting the truth is “misinformation” don't you know. Awakened sheep might turn into lions, so powerful people will do just about anything to keep the sheep from waking up.
Check out these videos:
What is causing the mysterious self-assembling non-organic clots?
If You Got the COVID Shot and Aren't Injured, This May Be Why
Take a look at my page called The H Word and Beyond. You might also want to look at my page called Zinc and Quercetin. My sister and I have been taking those two supplements since summer of 2020 in the hopes that they would scare away the flu and other viruses (or at least make them less severe).
Some people appear to have a mental illness because they have a vitamin B deficiency. For example, the wife of a guy I used to chat with online had severe mood swings which seemed to be caused by food allergies or intolerances. She would became irrational, obnoxious, throw tantrums, and generally act like she had a mental illness. The horrid behavior stopped after she started taking a vitamin B complex. I've been taking Jarrow B-Right (#ad) for many years. It makes me much easier to live with.
Unfermented soy is bad! “When she stopped eating soy, the mental problems went away.” Fermented soy doesn't bother me, but the various versions of unfermented soy (soy flour, soybean oil, and so on) that are used in all kinds of products these days causes a negative mental health reaction in me that a vitamin B complex can't tame. The sinister encroachment of soy has made the careful reading of ingredients a necessity.
If you are overweight, have type II diabetes, or are worried about the condition of your heart, check out the videos by Ken D Berry, William Davis, and Ivor Cummins. It seems that most people should avoid wheat, not just those who have a wheat allergy or celiac disease. Check out these books: Undoctored (#ad), Wheat Belly (#ad), and Eat Rich, Live Long (#ad).
Negative ions are good for us. You might want to avoid positive ion generators and ozone generators. A plain old air cleaner is better than nothing, but one that produces negative ions makes the air in a room fresher and easier for me to breathe. It also helps to brighten my mood.
Never litter. Toss it in the trash or take it home. Do not throw it on the ground. Also remember that good people clean up after themselves at home, out in public, at a campsite and so on. Leave it better than you found it.
Climate Change Cash Grab = Bad
Seems like more people than ever finally care about water, land, and air pollution, but the climate change cash grab scam is designed to put more of your money into the bank accounts of greedy politicians. Those power-hungry schemers try to trick us with bad data and lies about overpopulation while pretending to be caring do-gooders. Trying to eliminate pollution is a good thing, but the carbon footprint of the average law-abiding human right now is actually making the planet greener instead of killing it.
Eliminating farms and ranches, eating bugs, getting locked down in 15-minute cities, owning nothing, using digital currency (with expiration dates) that is tied to your social credit score, and paying higher taxes will not make things better and “save the Earth.” All that stuff is part of an agenda that has nothing to do with making the world a better place for the average person. It's all about control, depopulation, and making things better for the ultra-rich. They just want enough peasants left alive to keep things running smoothly.
Watch these two YouTube videos for more information:
Charlie Robinson had some good advice about waking up normies (see the link to the video below). He said instead of verbally unloading or being nasty or acting like a bully, ask the person a question. Being nice and asking a question will help the person actually think about the subject.
Interesting videos:
Charlie Robinson Talks About the Best Way to Wake Up Normies
Disclaimer
View this page and any external web sites at your own risk. I am not responsible for any possible spiritual, emotional, physical, financial or any other damage to you, your friends, family, ancestors, or descendants in the past, present, or future, living or dead, in this dimension or any other.