The 80 were a very special time for game making.

You had plenty of different and incompatible machines and each were very unique on its own powers.

You also didn´t have the billions of games and clones of today to path a road, so there were some very exotic games going around, some became classics, others were forgotten. One such gem was Outhouse.

Fun to mention me and my brother once pestered our parents to buy a new color computer game and we choose this one, tape version. As we were happily getting into the car to drive back home, we accidentally opened the tape case and the tape fell perfectly through a manhole...

We got around to buy it again a few months later but it was such a stroke of surprise bad mojo.

More information about the original game can found around the internet, here a couple links:

http://www.trs-80.org/outhouse/

http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/outhouse.html

But as you may already have suspected, it is all about an UFO protecting an outhouse against various perils. It is a single screen 8 way shoot em up with an interesting staging and notable elements like instant laser or smart bombs. It is a fun game.

Apart from a manhole infant rage, the plan is to remake and extend it.

The original on the original TRS-80 happens on a monochrome block character+text kind of weird resolution while the COCO version makes use of the graphics resolution and sports higher definition and a bunch of artifact colors. Now, note that the COCO also has a weird block character+text mode similar to its younger-in-name brother but... it has colors! In fact, about 9 of them more or less. There is a drawback, its resolution is lower. Can color overcome resolution? Because the plan is to use that mode of the COCO as close as possible.

There is an overlay grid exposing the block divisions, the catch is, within a block there can only be a maximum of 2 colors and one of them MUST be black. Should you plot a pixel that is a third color on a 2 color block, the non-black pixel will become the same color you just plotted. That makes it a very challenging mode to create art, also notice the colors are kind of very pure, no shades. If you are a pixel artist, these restrictions are very fun!

Notice the attention to position on the sprites, some of them can only exist at that very specific positions in relation to block limitation. You will also notice the pixels are square on this image, I will be stretching them to the COCO aspect ration in code. Also note that black elements can freely move around while colored elements needs to be surrounded by black at least through the direction it is moving (vertical/horizontal), least if you want it to move a single pixel.

A little curiosity about the display, behind the stage, the game happens on a square pixel 64x32 screen. It then gets scaled to fit an area of 256x192 in the middle of a 320x240 screen, which means blowing every pixel 4x horizontally and 6x vertically. At this screen, text characters are added as needed in game. Finally, the result gets scaled to a window mode or full screen mode retaining the aspect ration. Sounds a little complex but it was the only way I thought of when dealing with the fonts as they are a pure pixels against the color pixels inside the blocks, ie 320x240 <>64x32.

Finished control code, a very boring part, the game can be played by keyboard or joysticks and pads. It is also going to be a simultaneously two player game. The space will be short, but it can be made maneuverable.

Also added an sky transition to boost the drama.

At this point, one or two players can start the game and move the UFOs around, crash and die, get to a game over msg, and flip back to the text intro so to start over. Ufo movement is limited by the screen sides and ceiling. Will crash and lose a life if it kisses the floor. Will instantly game over if anyone crash on the outhouse. should that happen, you loose all score and any player left alive instantly runs away. Score will be by toilet paper amount. Should be an essentially cooperative game in case it is played by 2... but able to laser and crash with each other :) .

Major events will halt the game object movements, like the explosion. That is mostly because there will be some sound playing later on. The real speed is somewhat a slight faster than the gif. You start the game with 3 lives.

@brickshot, at TIG again, had this to say: Sitting here with my 8 year old trying to explain what this game is about She's like "Dad can we play outhouse?" Just thought you should know you have at least one eager play tester if it comes to that. Keep up the good work.

Working on the UFOs´ rays. Made the outhouse and its collisions with the UFOs. Notice the double shake, it should be used in future if not a deadly outhouse blow. Gotta add toilet papers flying about.

Gotta add more frames to that outhouse collapsing too, in the meanwhile, work has advanced on the UFO´s ray. It was particularly tricky first because it has to look super cool as it is something one will be looking a lot into when playing, second, the ray must trail an specific path, which happens to not be aligned to the UFO.

An UFO can be at position odd or even on either axis (x,y), let´s say, even is at a block position and odd is at a pixel position. The ray MUST trail block positions. The UFO sprite is 4 pixel wide and 3 at height. So if you shoot sideways, the ray can align either at the upper or lower part of an UFO´s 3 pixels height. This is no trouble because either way, it will be aligned with the color inside the UFO.

When shooting up or down, there is trouble. UFO at odd position will always shoot a centered ray but when at even position, the ray should either be at one of the UFO´s side block. That gets chosen based on the last left/right directions you moved or shot a ray with the UFO.

Super trouble was dealing the diagonals. There were also bugs related to the UFO positioned half outside the screen, as I originally planed. Now they all stay fully inside the screen. The ray multiply code kind of does not like the UFO with coords less then 0, I will play along that...

Trying to work out the paper toilet as it misbehaves every now and then.

That vandal is supposed to try to sneak close to the outhouse and as he touches it, he runs away pulling the paper in a long strip. You can shoot the vandal and the paper will retract back to the outhouse or you can shoot the paper itself and burn it out. If you shoot the outhouse when paper is out, it will also set it on fire. If the vandal leaves the screen, the paper snaps and goes on following him.

@QOG said: Love that you're pulling off such expressive animation at a tiny resolution.

The second human enemy is done, the squatter. This guy will rush in and away if the outhouse is in use. If not, he will shut himself in, use 8 papers and then walk away slowly and relieved. No vandals can steal paper while a squatter is in and if a squatter gets in while a vandal is pulling paper, the door closing will snap the paper and you loose that bit. Here an example, just need to push its priority to the more background, it should not draw over the humans. Also changed a bunch of animation on the humans so they don´t look/move the same.

There are 2 more humans to go and they will be done now as their sharing bits of code helps dev speed.

The next human is a bomber type of vandal, he will sneak to the outhouse, plant a time bomb and run away.

Also, if paper is zero and everyone is freaking about, like in the gif, a bomber will occasionally show up. If the bomb blows is an instant game over. To get rid of it, you have to shoot the outhouse to disarm it. Gotta keep in mind that hitting the outhouse always shakes it for 4 papers and if there is none, that will also instantly end the game.

edit: While cleaning up the text, I noticed I released the game and forgot to add that bomber in if out of time. :)

There is one more human type to do, the military guys.

Apart from wearing green, these guys will move around very fast between the side forests. They will usually sneak in the background between trees where they remain invincible. They will occasionally shoot you if you hover above them. These guys are to be the bosses on level 10, but will pop out on later waves/levels.

Now to the other enemies, we have bats, up to 20.

They fumble the trees before showing up and then slowly chase the ufos normally ending up orbiting them. Crash into them and loose a life.

One of the ideas behind them is that they might prevent the players into keeping flying low, since side shots can wipe several humans at the same time. So, if you are at the tree top area, one might pop out behind you, if you are lower than the trees, there is a lot of black and it can be hard to spot them, other than they showing up just above you and clutching your escape routes.

Hopefully it makes sense and works in game ;)

At later stages, meteors will randomly fall from the skies, think skylab debries. They will cause a little explosion if they hit the ground and may kill a bunch of people, they may also hurt the outhouse for a shake and a few papers if they hit its center. While falling, they will kill bats, drones, drone bullets and military bullets without being destroyed, unless you laser them of course, which you should be ready to in case one is to collide with the outhouse.

Added drones for both sides and, contrary to the bats and military shooting guys, these drones will pester you if you are above the trees only. They hunt your vertical position and after a red warning they fire 3 bullets. Their bullets can also kill bats, army bullets, drone bullets and other drones, for each, one bullet is destroyed. It won´t go through a meteor debris though.

The first boss. A huge bat that shows up randomly from whatever side at first and dashes to the other. From this point on, he will always choose to fly back either targeting players, targeting outhouse or randomly and so forth. It currently has 7 energy and each time you shoot it, it shakes and turns direction. If you kill it, it won´t return from offscreen. Seems easy to deal , but with him you have a swarm of normal bats popping out all the time and that makes it hard to keep the situation under control.

I think all living things in game are up and doing their stuff. This last one is the last boss, the second are the military guys. Cthulhu will show up on the last 3 stages and you can scare him away if you shoot him in the face with eyes open. Each later stage he opens his eyes a bit lower in altitude.

Time to layout the game stages. 15 waves a boss each 5.No hard cuts between stages.

So... a timeline with enemies additions that is controlled by a variable that freezes time until a minimum amount of enemies is met. This may also force the game screen uncluttered as nothing increases until you kill enemies to reach the minimum amount. During wave transition, a public servant in white/blue will pass by and refill some toilet paper.. He must be safely guarded until he gets to an EMPTY outhouse . He will show up 15 times for a total 75 paper with which we add the initial 24 papers and get to the highest score possible, 99. Yeah, the toilet paper count is the mutual player score.

edit: Ops, released the game with only 14 public guy coming out, so it is currently impossible to reach 99 but 94... will fix that in the next update release :)

You can take cover behind the chthhulhu and the military dudes will shoot him, you can also trick the drones that way, even to help kill some bats.

Working with the sound effects, and while at that, I compiled a sequence of real coco game sounds. They are from many different games and serve as an idea of what the machine is capable. I hope to come up with sounds that are closer to what the coco can do.

If you know the coco or the dragon computers, you might get a flashback from hearing those sounds but, in general, many computers and arcade at the time did produce similar sound effects.

I have also been tinkering with producing my sound/music directly on the coco or emulator.

For that, Stevie Strow did a neat BASIC programming series and this one chapter here talks about a very powerful (unique?) PLAY command. Check it out:

Sound fx has been taking quite some time, I under estimated it for sure. There is more or less possibly 50 sound locations. So I went filling them up and code implementing it. Some sounds I was already sure about, many others are place holders. There is also a lot of sound locations that are probably going to be dropped, I over made them for such on purpose.

Attempting to follow the TRS-80 Color sound spec is also a hard thing to do. Most of time sound is played the computer halts/pause, so it abuses fast sounds and with machine language you add a certain level of sounds together with little visual action. The sound itself is great, as you can hear from the last video, but one also has to consider no 2 sounds play together and a lot of other restrictions. Coding such is possible but I feel not necessary for this game, so some mixing will be considered.

Designed a poster to go along with the game. It is a clone of the trs-80 color 2 tech manual´s wireframe exploded illustration made as a 13k x 18k resolution so it should print fine at 300dpi to a size more or less up to 1.5 meters. Here is one of the work in progress tests, a filled transparent version should also be added later up.

The game is pretty much targeted at those who had this computer (or the variations). I thought to ask a $5 for the effort and that seems a bit too much compared to my other games. It will look like I´m trying to cash in on the community! :D Well, I actually am, but not in an evil fashion :D , so I thought to add value to it and all together give away a neat illustration or two, possibly even the 3d model used. Those should later be added to the repository archive.

Sound effects are complete and everything seems to be reaching the end. Finished balancing the waves, energy counts, etc. All in shape. Release time!