Vectrex Academy 2022

[Peer]

Greetings everyone!

Some good news, Vectrex Academy 2022 has started on March 14th Here is the link:

Vectrex Academy 2022 Project Gallery

As of today, there are 10 students participating, which is a great number, and we are currently meeting in class. So, in contrast to the past two years, this is not on online course. Well, at least for now. Let's hope it stays this way.

What is not so nice, two of my Vectrex consoles have broken down. It seems they did not take kindly to sitting idle in a closet during the past online semesters. One is completely dead, the other suffers from the infamous sound-but-no-picture syndrom. I have not yet found the time to investigate this any closer, but I hope we will find a way to repair them. Luckily we still have a third one we can use in class.

On Monday, I gave the general introduction to the course, and the students are now playing the original 1982 games to get a feeling for the style and the look of the Vectrex games. Some of them have already submitted their first ideas for their own projects.

Many Cheers,

Peer

[VECTREXER]

Mar 16, 2022 5:00:39 GMT -5 Peer said:

Greetings everyone!

Some good news, Vectrex Academy 2022 has started on March 14th Here is the link:

Vectrex Academy 2022 Project Gallery

As of today, there are 10 students participating, which is a great number, and we are currently meeting in class. So, in contrast to the past two years, this is not on online course. Well, at least for now. Let's hope it stays this way.

What is not so nice, two of my Vectrex consoles have broken down. It seems they did not take kindly to sitting idle in a closet during the past online semesters. One is completely dead, the other suffers from the infamous sound-but-no-picture syndrom. I have not yet found the time to investigate this any closer, but I hope we will find a way to repair them. Luckily we still have a third one we can use in class.

On Monday, I gave the general introduction to the course, and the students are now playing the original 1982 games to get a feeling for the style and the look of the Vectrex games. Some of them have already submitted their first ideas for their own projects.

Many Cheers,

Peer

Very cool to see the Retro Programming - Vectrex Academy 2022 course return again this year!

[D-Type]

Great news it's running again and especially now it's back in the classroom.

Good luck with getting the Vectrex running again, you need to get the electronics students on the case!

[VectorX]

^Ha ha!

Mar 16, 2022 5:00:39 GMT -5 Peer said:

What is not so nice, two of my Vectrex consoles have broken down.

Man, you've had some bad luck with this over the years.

The thread's stickied, as per usual.

[big10p]

I would suspect the power switches on both Vectrexes, especially if they haven't been used in a while. The contacts may already have been quite worn, and have now also oxidized through lack of use. I would at least bypass the switches on both, if only to rule them out as the problem.

[drsnuggles]

Yeah, good news in 2022.

i wish all students good luck and some kind of fun while coding.
Looking forward to see some of the concepts as games.

Good luck also in repairing the two consoles.

[Peer]

Mar 16, 2022 13:03:37 GMT -5 VectorX said:

^Ha ha!

Mar 16, 2022 5:00:39 GMT -5 Peer said:

What is not so nice, two of my Vectrex consoles have broken down.

Man, you've had some bad luck with this over the years.

The thread's stickied, as per usual.

Greetings everyone!

Thanks a lot for all your nice and encouraging comments here. And thanks VectorX for making the thread sticky.

Those two consoles are the ones that have broken down (and have been repaired) before. They are our main working-horses which have been used in the classroom over and over again. So I am rather telling myself to feel lucky that they have been working under heavy duty for a long time over the past years. I have already reached out to a former student from Electrical Engineering who has done some Vectrex repair work in the past, and I hope that he will be able to fix the consoles once more.

Other than that, there have been more project ideas coming in from the students, and I have added some more concept art to the project pages, but everything is still very early. One student has dropped out, and another (new) one has asked to join in. So the number of participants is still around a hopefully stable ten.

Many Cheers,

Peer

[Peer]

Greetings everyone,

here is a short update of our classroom activities:

• Last Monday I taught the students how to set up and how to use our Vectrex C programming environment. I also gave an introduction to the specifics and specialties of vector graphics in general, and especially of how the Vectrex graphics hardware works.
  
• Plenty of updates have been done to the project gallery page. There is concept-art now for almost all of the projects.
  
• Good news: both broken vectrex consoles are working again It was indeed the power switches what had caused the problems.

Many Cheers,

Peer

[hcmffm]

Very good that another Vectrex Academy takes place, Peer. It's the 7th Vectrex Academy, right? Thank you, Peer, for the Vectrex Academy pages and sharing the students ideas from the very beginning.
I had a look at the various concepts and artwork - please find some quick comments and feedback below. My comments are are quickly written up and reflect a bit what came one my mind. Please don't expect too much and please consider them as appreciation and encouragement. I wish you all students, of the 7th Vectrex Academy 2022 good success and fun. Thank you very much for your effort in programming your Vectrex game!

__

RESCUE MISSION
I like the game idea and game concept of Rescue Mission. The game might do very well without shooting - combined with a realistic control this might be good fun, challenging and exciting. When colliding, the space shuttle might not be destroyed necessarily but its velocity and/or rotation might be affected so that you (the player) has to struggle to get the shuttle under his/her control, again.

VECTREXIT
When I read "Maze game" this reminded me of the game "Maze Craze" available on the Atari VCS 2600 back in 1978. A maze that keeps changing sounds very interesting - it might be a challenge to get balance between luck and strategy right.


SPACE SHOOTER
On the Vectrex there are a quite a number of Shmups availabe. But sure enough there is always room for more. The graphics of player space ship and enemies look cool and the thoughts about the speed of the game and the player's shots sound pretty sophisticated to me. I'm not quite sure whether all of this (end bosses, ...) is doable within one Vectrex Academy - perhaps it's a good idea to split up the project in several increments. Just an idea...

ROAD RUNNER
The game concept is cool and a good idea for the Vectrex. It might be a challenge to get the 3D effect both smooth and fast enough on the Vectrex. A (more or less) intuitive control making use both of joystick and buttons will make Road Runner both challenging and fun. (Note: Instead of a rope I think a simple jump would be also fine.)


GRAIN SLING
Feeding chickens with a sling?! I much hope that soft food and soft drinks are served. Perhaps clipping graphics of appearing chickens might be a good idea but might be less performant than exchanging chicken graphics.


SAVE THE PLANET
Took me a short while to understand what "PVE shooter" means. Controls "Up" / "Down" are realistic but this might be quite confusing, here (but easy to change if it doesn't turn out well). Perhaps when destroying the enemies something like a parachute migth appear that the player can pick up to get extra points or to refuel player's plane. Nice that there are several types of player planes (old ones and modern ones). Enemies could look a bit more UFO like - at first I thought that these were tanks.

CUBE RUNNER
This concept paper has many details in it and is almost worth while printing out as a poster. There are many things planned for the final game - personally I'd cut down things a bit and/or develop in (playable) increments. Perhaps you can exchange ideas with the developer of "Road Runner".

EVASIVE
While "Cube Runner" has the best handwritten game concept, you (CaptainObvious) have definitely the most professional looking game concept. (EDIT: WoodPeaker with his/her BUBBLE SPLITTER and you have both rank #1.) Adding a flight mode to a jump and run sounds like a good idea to me. Perhaps graphics could be even more minimalistic (column combined with triangle).

ANGRY SHAPES
The story of the intelligent gas cloud is interesting. Perhaps the gas cloud could live in some way and transformations of the cloud could be intelligent (e.g. from triangle to rectangle to star, ...). The "Joker" is an interesting feature and it took me a second to understand that it's a special sort of shield. Hopefully, players have many jokers. Compared to Bedlam you might change various things, e.g. when hitting the gas cloud (and not the shots of the gas cloud) the gas cloud might shrink a bit and thus encourage the player to shoot precisely.

BUBBLE SPLITTER
Another professional looking game concept. Game concept sounds a bit like "Kaboom" on the Atari 2600 but with jumping bubbles and shooting it will be quite different. Perhaps you can do without shooting (e.g. raise arms instead) - it might be a cool game for kids, then. And you might get a sponsorship from Pustefix. ;-)

TEACHING EXAMPLE
What can I say? Game concept: secret. Details: Secret. Title: secret. Only developer is known in the Vectrex scene.

- o -

[Peer]

Thanks a lot, hcmffm, for posting your thoughts on the game concepts here. As always, this is highly appreciated, and I will relay your feedback to the students coming Monday at the next class meeting. Also, many thanks for your words of encouragement. Such things keep us all (students as well as teacher) motivated

I am sorry for not having posted more frequently so far. Once again there are too many other things interfering. Here is a quick summary of the recent classroom sessions. We have talked about some of the internal details of the C programming environment (preprocessor, C to assembly compilation, assembly to binary compilation, linker mechanism), and about basic organization of game code. We also had a quick look at the 6809 processor, and then went through the delicacies of Vectrex vector (list) drawing several times. On our agenda for next Monday is an introduction to Vide, pseudo random number generation (by student request), and probably some game programming specific data structures.

As for the ´teaching example´, well, there is nothing secret about it. I simply have not yet decided what to use here. I have been thinking about maybe trying to finish one of my uncompleted projects. Suggestions welcome  But right now I rather doubt that there will be enough time left even for just that. So I might use just some code snippets as teaching examples instead of a whole project. We will see…

Many Cheers,
Peer

[drsnuggles]

Wow, a lot happened!
Thanks to hcmffm for the detailed analysis of game concepts and constructive ideas.
I hope some students are reading here.
Looking forward to your final thoughts of submitted games like the years before.

[Peer]

Here is a short and rather non-update:

Unfortunately, last Monday we could not meet in class as I was sick and unfit for duty. So there is not much to report. The students have continued working on their projects at home, and there has been one tiny update to the project gallery page. Hopefully, there will be more to write about next week.

Many Cheers,

Peer

[jgkspsx]

These are all very exciting! I am very excited for half of them and extremely excited about the rest

EDIT: for an interesting comparison to Road Runner, check out A-VCS-Tec Challenge on the 2600.

[Peer]

Greetings everyone,

last Monday, we addressed the following topics in class:

• introduction to Vide, especially to using tracki to analyze cycle counts
• pseudo random number generation and procedural content generation
• debugging Vectrex C code by using inline assertions and static assertions           
  

Several updates have been done to the project web pages. Most of them (though not yet all) reflect the current status of the projects. More updates are on their way. There is already a development binary of project "Space Shooter" available. This is not yet an alpha binary for any serious testing, but was uploaded for anyone interested in the possibility to play around a bit. Feedback, as usual, is welcome.

Many Cheers,

Peer 

[hcmffm]

Thank you for your update and the updates to the project pages, Peer. A surprise that an early alpha binary is available, already.

Some minor comments/suggestions:

Save the planet

This one is for you (Peer): Link of ConceptArt 1 links to concept art 2 on the project page of Save the Planet.

Square Run

Overlay looks great. Perhaps all elements including the font could be square. (I've got something on my mind and I'll post a draft in the coming few days.)

VectrEXIT

I was about suggesting to rename "VectrEXIT" to "VectrExit" but then I realized that "EXIT" is fine because all signs say "EXIT" and not "Exit". Good to see first graphics, I'll post some drafts for the player and "enemies" in the next couple of days.

So much for now. Keep up the good work, everyone!

- o -