Scramble (arcade game remake)

[RokCoder]

Having finished Galaga I decided to try converting my all time favourite arcade game, Scramble. It's gone pretty well I think!

Controls are arrow keys to move and A/Z to fire and bomb.

The ZIP file contains scramble.bas along with a subfolder called assets which contains all the sound effects, graphics, etc. After building the project, the EXE must reside in the same folder as the BAS file. It accesses the assets folder relatively so won't find it if the EXE is in the wrong place.

Hope you have fun!

Great job on this, it is very faithful to the original. 

That meteor stage is HARD! If I was back in 6th grade, I would have already spent my entire summer's paper route money in one evening!

I realize the original game was played on a vertically oriented CRT, however on the PC, I find the screen orientation is a little claustrophobic. 

How difficult would it be for you to tweak a "widescreen" version that makes use of the full screen, and displays more of the game horizontally? 

PS And next, how about taking Scramble and moving it into 3 dimensions for... ZAXXON? 

Anyway, great job and thanks for sharing this! 

PS In order to not lose any more paper route money, I added some constants (lines 46-50) so I have a prayer at making it to the final stages of the game! Maybe adding some difficulty settings would make it enjoyable for young players, or those of us who are challenged in the reflexes department. 

Thanks for the nice feedback!

I just tested a theoretical approach to widening the screen and was pleasantly surprised that it worked perfectly. I mean, the intent was there when I wrote it with the constants but I hadn't tested it out. If you change SCREEN_WIDTH from 224 to 448 then you'll have a wide screen presentation of Scramble (albeit with scores, instructions, etc all off-centre). It wouldn't be much of a reach to get the HUD to centralise things as well but not something I'm likely to get around to doing. In a similar vein, you could use the actual full-screen dimensions for SCREEN_WIDTH and SCREEN_HEIGHT and it should work fine (as long as they're divisible by eight).

I was only aiming for a direct conversion. Options, difficulty settings, etc would all be nice to have but there have only been 29 downloads from the forum so it kinda seems a lot of work for likely a handful of people to play it. That said, please do feel free to improve things and add a PR to the github. I would love to see these things in there - I just don't see myself doing any more work on it.

I'm finishing off a few Unity projects right now but may well revisit QB64 in the future. I had in mind to do New Rally X if/when I get to that point but Zaxxon would be an interesting one, too. It depends if I can rip the graphics and layouts from somewhere. I just don't have the patience to put those together manually