itch.io

That's a really nice presentation of the entries! Thanks to the organisers, judges and Retrogaming Dino for the hard work, and well done all!

In case it helps anyone else coming to this thread: I found it was that it only tries to use turnstile when there's a link in my comment. I had a look at the code and could see that it would only try to use turnstile when the server says it "needs turnstile" (and that's where it breaks, because the developers forgot to wire up their site key). Guessing what the condition was when the people here can clearly comment _some of the time_, I took the link out of my comment and it worked.

Largely trial and error. I started with just generating a straight section of the body, and writing a colour function that would create scales. This needed a few attempts - do scales grow in width with the body or are the scales constant width (answer: constant), which curve to use? are rows of scales directly above each other or offset? (and this is why I was staring at pictures on wikimedia)

Next I neeed to make the body curve; this was based on some work I'd done before drawing strip maps (a map where a route along a road is straightened out into a column for use alongside text describing the route, usually). In that, I'd have a curved path I need to sample pixels from to draw a straight path; the reverse of what I'm doing here. When doing that I used what's known as a Dubins Path (the path a robot with a fixed turning radius would use) because it avoids overlapping samples on the inside of the curve and disconnected samples on the outside that come with making the curves too tight.

The tapering of the body was just the first thing I tried, the spikes were a hack that just worked well, and then I just had to come up with something for the head - I tried a bunch of different things like fractals before hitting on this, but there was no great theory to these bits.

I've done a bunch of "art" for the bbc microbot so this wasn't my first time tackling a problem like this, it's just a matter of breaking it down to pieces you can try independently then putting them back together. You should take a look at the bbcmicrobot gallery (link removed in case that's what's causing itch to block me commenting)- it's not just me, there's a bunch of us doing this kind of thing.

Hey, (author here) I do like the animation, it makes it very clear what's going on compared to the slow real time run - I saw the comment by cracknrom on your youtube channel, from my point of view I'm ok with it going in that webzine. (I'd reply over there but my user id on yt is different and it might not be clear I'm me)

This game doesn't work as advertised; looking at the code it expects the screen to be 80 characters wide. That wasn't true on the 40 column Apple IIe unless you had the extra 80 column text expansion card. If you have one (and many emulators do) you can usually turn it on by typing PR#3 at the command line before running the program. That's not been done on the linked internet archive emulator (I'm pretty sure this isn't just me - all the screenshots attached to the internet archive emulation show the screen size is incorrect), but if you load it in another emulator like https://apple2ts.com/ that command is enough to make the game display correctly.

The text "The program is intentionally monochrome" doesn't match the image, which is mostly violet and green. That's because it doesn't use HPLOT correctly - on Apple IIe HPLOT green and orange only displayed in even columns, violet and blue in odd columns, and white only appears when adjacent odd and even columns are set. So line 6 should be: HPLOT2*INT(X(I)/2),Y(I):HPLOT2*INT(X(I)/2)+1,Y(I). (tested, actually plots white stars). Also at the original 1MHz, 20 stars is too slow to see that the stars form trails, it looks like random dot placement. It needs to be more like 5 stars.