GoKawiilCreating the Game
PvP-AI is a recreation of an 8-bit game I wrote back in 1990. The only traces left of the original are a few drawings and handwritten notes. Back then, writing for an 8-bit platform, it took every bit of memory and CPU to eke out 4 frames/s with the simplest of animations and backgrounds. Alas, by the time I finished it, the 1990 recession had begun, affecting many industries, including personal computers, so nothing came of it.
A few years ago, a YouTube channel by David Murray The8BitGuy caught my eye, in particular his Commander X16 retro-computer. Looking over the specifications, I realized it might be able to handle a newer incarnation of PvP-AI.
As it turns out, the emulator was able to handle it very nicely, running at almost 8.6 frames/s, with more detail and better AI! Here’s a video of it in action. The actual hardware, though… it turns out there’s a line drawing issue in the VERA module such that certain kinds of lines aren’t rendered correctly, meaning it has to fall back on a slower method. The end result is only 4 frames/s on hardware.
If you want to try it out, you can download the files from my Google Drive. I recommend using the x16-emulator, specifically R49, to run it. More details are in my GitHub EXPLORE repository under CX16 v2 – AI Demo (a.k.a. PvP-AI).
Of note are some peculiarities in gameplay, differentiating it from your typical “shoot-’em-up” 8-bit game:
the arena layout changes based on the highest level reached by any player
missiles have limited intelligence and can navigate around and above walls
if a player brings another player’s health to zero, both players advance in level
players advance in level only at the final level (level 6) does losing all health eliminate a player from the game
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