LÖVE

WELCOME TO EAT IT! (Works in both 0.8.0 and 0.9.0. Nine is preferred and so much better.)

Updated: August 27th - New version: P2

Eat It! is a clone of a 31-year-old Atari 2600 game called Fast Food. It was my first video game as a child. The original was created by Don Ruffcorn at Telesys. A company that went out of business when the great north-American video game crash of 1983 happened. The developer has disappeared off the grid and never programmed another game again. The game has supposedly become abandonware. Since I'm not selling it, I can't see why a loving tribute can't be released. (I hope to submit it to a few indie game reviewers on YouTube once I polish it into the ground.) I still have my original cartridge. Well, the circuit board at least. I did get a replacement from a friend on DigitalPress who got it at a yard sale. It's great to have as a collectors item. The official artwork for the label and instruction manual are awesome. If only I owned a still in box copy. I wonder if the artwork was on the box. My god I'd love to have that. (You don't see many Atari games still in box anymore.)

It's just a simple project I've been working on for a few weeks to clear my head after my last big 3D engine project hit a slight speed bump. I think it's gone really well. I have tried to recreate this game a few times. Originally I had a QuickBASIC version which worked so damn well. Sadly I never kept the .bas file and a friend who says he has the floppy disk never gave it back yet. Plus, what the heck is a floppy disk? I wouldn't even be able to use it. I then tried to make it in TNTBasic later on. I actually extracted the original graphics for this version out of my archives and upscaled them 4x their original size (50x50 pixels) to save some time. Worked out pretty well for a prototype.


Sorry, Mark, no tacos yet.


HOW TO PLAY:
I hope you're hungry because you're in for the feast of your life! Eat as much as you can and rack up those calories! But watch out for the PURPLE PICKLES! They will stick around and eventually give you a bad case of HEARTBURN! Once you get six of those it's all over.

Eat as much food as you can. Each type of food has its own calorie count so try and go for the most. Every 500 calories one purple pickle will be removed from your total, but it's not as easy as it sounds. Every once in a while you will need to take a break and when it's time to return, the food will be even faster than before!

Think you can keep up?

Move Mr. Mouth with the arrow keys. That's about it. If you must, you can edit the preferences.lua file to change the keys. (At some point I'll put an actual key changing interface. Launch the game once to create the file, then look in the proper working directory.)

There is no safe spot on the board. So keep on your toes!

Every 50 pieces of food the level goes up and the speed increases. As does the score multiplier.


SCORING:
Every piece of food is worth 10 points x the current multiplier x the current level. The multiplier is determined by how many subsequent pieces of food you can eat without hitting a purple pickle.


FEATURES:
Up to 1080p scaled graphics. The game is rendered with 1080p in mind and scaled down. In Löve 0.9.0 it uses the new window resizing feature, otherwise in 0.8.0 you can hit a key to change the size of the window, or press F11 to go fullscreen. Fullscreen will render at the native resolution of the display for nice crisp graphics.

Sprites all painstakingly drawn by hand, and aren't quite good enough. I don't have any artistic capabilities but would love to have them drawn at high resolution painted style. But the ones I have right now are quite nice. They're drawn at 200x200 size each. But I'd want to redraw at 300x300 so they look smooth at maximum resolution.

Mr. Mouth opens wider in anticipation of delicious food. Maybe I should add drool. Maybe not.

Sound effects are ripped (Well, recorded) right from the original Atari game. I don't think they could really get much better.

Yes, it works in both 0.8.0 and 0.9.0. Nine has window resizing. It's awesome.


FUTURE:
Obviously I'd love to replace the graphics, but I'd rather finalize the game first. I also want to change GUI graphics too. Maybe something to replicate the original game's artwork.

I need to add more food. Need tacos.

"Boss" fights. I have an idea for kind of bosses. Where each level ends with a "fight" against a different food boss. Where it starts by throwing purple pickles at you, and then throws itself at you. (For instance the pizza boss would be a whole pizza that will then throw all 8 slices of itself at you before ending the level.)

The scoring system was put in purely for high scoring reasons. The original only had calories. If I had to I'd remove it but right now it makes for some nice point combos.

A high score table would be awesome. And easy to implement. Eventually. Because when I implement it, you can bet my high score will become the number one slot.

I'll put in a normal menu. I mean I already coded a menu GUI library for myself. I'm just too lazy right now to bring it over.

Xbox controller support. If and when xboxlove is updated for 0.9.0. Because why bother if Löve won't even support it in a few months?

Now that I have put this out I can start working on another project. I'm thinking I'm gonna try and finish that Mario Kart clone I was thinking of. But don't get no hopes up or nothin'.


CAN YOU BEAT MY HIGH SCORE?
Classic: 2,983,150 on level 9 (1,398 calories)
3 Minute: 4,998,260 on level 23 (5,355 calories)
This is like my first released actual kind of finished but not completely game. All others were prototype engines of some sort or another.

I saw this 2 seconds after the release, seems interesting!

The transitions between levels look awesome.

I want to put in a timed mode where you have 5 minutes or whatever to get as high a score as you can while avoiding the pickles which won't kill you, but will reset your multiplier as normal. Give it a little extra variety.

I might have to tweak the scoring though. I got a super high score and was on a roll. I didn't time myself though so I'll probably add your play time to the high score table when I implement that. The original didn't even have a score, it was just calorie count. I contemplated removing score all together to keep it more faithful and since it was redundant, but I dunno. I just love high scoring.

I would like to "finish" this game at some point by polishing it and adding those features and then I will submit it to some of my favorite YouTube Indie reviewers like Nerd Cubed and RockLeeSmile (Indie Impressions) as they are always taking suggestions. RockLeeSmile does videos every day too so it might not be too long of a wait. (No idea) Would be really neat to see something I created getting exposure and being enjoyed. But I need to make sure it's enjoyable.

Also, if you're interested, the original manual is inside the .love in JPG format. It's pretty neat to read.

Wasn't able to beat your high score (602,000 something).

Those food items on background of the start menu, they change sometimes. Is it some kind of cellular automaton or something?

Robin wrote:Wasn't able to beat your high score (602,000 something).

Those food items on background of the start menu, they change sometimes. Is it some kind of cellular automaton or something?

Well, it's just a bunch of "cars" that walk along the grid changing the food as they go. One car for every food type. Pretty simple. Is cars the right word? Cars walk, right?

There's no reason that line should have a problem. Try again. I don't get an error on either Windows or OS X in either 0.8.0 or 0.9.0.

Edit: Probably fixed in the next version. But I still don't know what would cause it.

Jasoco wrote:Well, it's just a bunch of "cars" that walk along the grid changing the food as they go. One car for every food type. Pretty simple. Is cars the right word? Cars walk, right?

Ah, okay, I get it.

Oh yeah? You're just so assertive and confident about your flawless code that can't possibly fail that I decided to see what's going on for myself:

It happens when you go to the next level at I dunno what point, since it doesn't displays the level and I didn't count them. And I think I found the problem: Guess what happens if either of those is above 9. SPOILERS: download/file.php?mode=view&id=23157

Which easily leads to conclusion that these lines of code are causing the whole trouble: Place a limit to game.skill value, or extend the multiplierList table. Or, better yet, just compute required values via function rather than look them up. To me, this is really messy way to set the game.skill value anyway.