Pit is finished.
Today i finished Pit. It is running on my xbox 360 right now and i am currently in full retro mode - almost played for two hours before i was finally able to pick up my camcorder and do a little video of the gameplay. Here is an embedded youtube link to a little presentation of the game:
I am quite pleased with the final result. The game is just as playable and enjoyable as the 25 year old original plus it runs on my favourite console. Concerning the control scheme i decided to take a somewhat unconventional way. As i wanted to do it digital and the digipad of the 360 is plain and simple the most horrible one i ever encountered on any game system i went for the shoulder buttons. There is just going right or going left anyway so that seemed like a good approach. Turns out it works pretty well.
Here is a link to the published windows binary. I decided not to release the source because i am shure the only thing someone could learn from it is how to produce bloated and inefficient code. If someone is interested in the source for running the game on the xbox360 contact me via email and i will send it.
In case someone knowing the original Pit is reading this: Yes, there are several differences to the original which i implemented on purpose:
o There is no extra screen after loosing a life telling your score and how many lifes you have left - that information is readily available from the main game screen so i don’t see the point (apart from annoying and generally irritating the player)
o There is no extra game over screen because i think the avarage-intelligent player will very well notice when he wasted his last life.
o When hit by one of those deadly raindrops (yeah, i did some research, those falling things are not stones, they are supposed to be raindrops) you will not be greeted by that annoying color-strobe effect of your remains.
o The walking sounds are different. (Thats actually myself now making clicking sounds in front of the integrated micro of my laptop). That is because i couldn’t get my audio software to record those faint walking sounds and i didn’t have the nerve to mess around with a machine monitor in my vic-20 emulator to hunt for the original sound data.
o I modified the instructions screen to my new control scheme (keys a and d or gamepad shoulder buttons). While doing that i took the liberty of centering some of the lines to make it a little less optically appalling than the original (have a look at that here).
Now that i have done Pit it soon will be time to think about the next project. It will either be a port of my ‘Scharping Attack’ space invaders clone or another VIC-20 or C-64 game port.



