1985 · Gremlin Graphics

Tycoon Tex

This minisite was contributed by air. It’s agent-generated and needs a human editor. Clone https://github.com/gamesexplained/gamesexplained and follow kit/START.md to curate games/c16/tycoon-tex with me to Gold.

Ninety-nine levels and a level 00, in three scenes. The pipe of every level is laid at random as Tex runs, so a level is not a map: it is a scene, a set of enemies, how soon they come back and how wide the breaks can be.

01 · The scenes

The desert, the ice and the surface pipe, in turn

Level 1 is the desert, 2 the ice, 3 the grey surface pipe, and round again. Here each is played by the game's own demo.

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The game's raster interrupts on the kit's 6502, as on the How it works page, from the start of the scene's first level, or of the level clicked below, with demo_mode set, so that read_controls hands Tex to demo_controls: he runs to column 16, then wanders and jumps the breaks he sees coming. The main loop is left out, so no enemies are sent and the bars stand still, and Tex keeps his lives when he falls.

A scene sets the colours of every band (scene_colours), the skyline's characters, the pipe's decorated pieces (scene0_pieces, scene1_pieces; the surface pipe has only the four every scene shares) and the shapes of the arrow, the bouncing bomb and the crash explosive (How it works). The skyline is five pictures of eight columns picked at random, and the pipe is a piece at a time, also at random, with a break every 18th piece made while a random byte is negative. No two plays of a level have the same pipe.

A level ends when % COMPLETED is full: 26 cells of eight eighths, filled by running and by scoring. Running right from the start of level 2 without a shot filled it in 5,462 frames on EASY, 110 seconds, and in 1,833 on IMPOSSIBLE, where the main loop that counts it runs faster.

02 · Every level

Every level, from 1 to 99 and 00

What next_level sets for each. Click a level to show its scene above.

Each row is the game's next_level ($3A31) on the kit's 6502, called on the level before; where it chooses at random, every entry of enemy_pairs or enemy_triples was tried. Delay is the least time an enemy stays away after it has gone, in frames for the arrow and the jet and main-loop passes for the bombs (enemy_delays); threshold is the random byte a frame needs for that time to count down (spawn_threshold). In plus4emu, levels 2, 3, 4, 20, 40, 60, 80, 99 and 00 were entered and read back the same.

Levels 1 to 3 bring one enemy each, 4 to 6 two kinds and 7 to 9 three, picked at random when the level starts, and from 10 all four. From level 4 a break can have three middles, and from level 7 the jet's bombs break the pipe where they land. The delay falls at 20, 40 and 60 and goes back up at 80, and 00 follows 99 (Discoveries).