Chomper Man - Small Basic Featured Game

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Today's featured program is SB Chomper, a packman clone. It's fantastic! You can play it here:

 

Chomper (Packman) - by Anthony Yarrell/QBasicLover

 

Who is Anthony Yarrell (goes by QBasicLover)? Here is his bio in his own words...

Anthony Yarrell's avatar

"I (Anthony Yarrell, a.k.a. QBasicLover) am an office support worker in the health insurance industry. I became a hobbyist (amateur) programmer starting with QBasic under MS-DOS 6.22 "back in the day". Now I program primarily in Microsoft Visual Basic 2010, Microsoft Small Basic, and Java. My goal is to create my own versions of the classic games that I grew up with in the 1980s & 90s (Atari games, Commodore 64 games, early Nintendo games, Vectrex, etc), not only for my own pleasure, but also for educational purposes in the Microsoft Small Basic forum."

And here is the import code and the release notes...

These notes are about the final version (he may work out any remaining bugs when he does a version 2 in the summer):

BFN681 (import code)

Known Bugs (that remain to be fixed):

  • SBC (the packman character) sometimes doesn't appear when the level starts. Just press one of the arrow keys to show him.

Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed collision detection based on code in the "Animation & Timing" chapter of Starting Microsoft Small Basic.
  • Fixed issue with monsters getting stuck in the monster pen.
  • Fixed the issue with the tunnels.
  • Fixed the issue where the splash text isn't removed completely.
  • Fixed an issue I found with the way the score was being calculated (I made a math goof)

Added the following features:

  • Changed the syncronization method I was using which improved performance a little bit. Later, I will post this code in the forum because I've found it useful for dynamically managing the speed of sprites in a game.
  • The points you get for eating a monster appears at the point on the screen where the monster was eaten (like in the real pacman).
  • You get an extra life if you exceed 50,000 pts.
  • You get an extra life on levels 4 and 8
  • You get an extra life if you eat 16 monsters per level.
  • Figured out how to get the monsters to slow down when at tunnel entrances (like in the real pacman)
  • Used Graphicswindow.PenWidth to brighten the colors a little bit.

 

Thanks to LitDev for nominating Chomper in this forum thread: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/smallbasic/thread/c75994be-5ecd-4f72-83a5-39ce66ebadfb

Enjoy!

   - Ninja Ed