UPDATE!!!

Wheeeee!

A brand-new platformer for the Commodore 64, written 100% in 6502 assembly.

Run, jump, dodge and collect your way through an endless adventure across four hand-crafted worlds. No two games are the same: every level is generated on the fly by the C64 itself, then checked so that every coin, gem and power-up can actually be reached. Your journey always starts in Green Valley.

Features

• Endless, procedurally generated levels. The C64 builds each stage in a fraction of a second from dozens of level pieces: pits, spike fields, staircases to hidden gems, rows of bonus blocks, floating islands. The difficulty rises a little with every level you clear.
• Four worlds, each with its own rules, music and look
  • Green Valley: sunny meadows, mushrooms and cheeky little birds dropping eggs on your head.
  • Mount Fire: lava caves, fireballs with faces and lava bubbles leaping out of the pits.
  • Alien Moon: low gravity for huge floaty jumps, alien jellyfish and a ringed planet in the sky.
  • Robopolis: a night-time steel city where the robots run twice as fast and robot wasps drop bombs.
• A boss for every world. Every 10 levels a giant boss waits at the end of the stage, and it depends on the world you are in: the Scarab King stomps and makes projectiles rain down; the Magma Golem hurls lava and makes it erupt under your feet, and shrugs off your fireballs; the Jellyfish Queen floats out of reach and only lands for a moment; the Mega Robot charges across the arena and overheats. Each new boss is tougher than the last. If you fall in battle, you restart at the arena entrance, not at the start of the level.
• Power-ups hidden in the ! blocks, shown in the status bar as bright inverse labels while they are active
  • Shield: a rainbow force field that destroys whatever touches it.
  • Fire: throw bouncing fireballs until you get hit.
  • Magnet: pulls in every coin nearby.
• Gems, 1UP hearts and coins (100 coins = extra life), a time limit matched to each level, and a time bonus when you reach the star.
• Juicy animations: a springy jump with a landing squash, an arcade-style death, drowning in the pits, and a teleport effect that beams you away inside the goal star.
• SID music and sound effects: a two-voice soundtrack with its own tune for the title screen and for every world, from the cheerful Green Valley theme to the driving beat of Mount Fire and the neon groove of Robopolis, while the third voice is kept free for the sound effects.

Pushing the C64

Wheeeee! borrows a few tricks from the demoscene:

• a full-screen parallax landscape with five layers scrolling at different speeds, built from 14 raster interrupts per frame and tuned so that every layer lands on the right pixel on every single frame;
• bit-level scrolling of the near layers, colour cycling (pulsing lava, flickering city lights) and animated character sets (spinning coins, flashing blocks, sparkling gems);
• mixed hires and multicolour graphics in the same screen, with a bitmap title screen that reveals itself line by line;
• a teleport effect that switches the player's sprites from multicolour to hires, turning them into crackling energy;
• sprite multiplexing in the status bar: three enemy sprites are borrowed for a few raster lines to draw the inverse power-up labels, then handed back before the enemies need them.

Controls

• Move: joystick left / right, or A / D, or the cursor keys
• Jump: fire button, or Z, Space or Return
• Crouch: joystick down, or S
• Shoot (with the Fire power-up): joystick up, or W

The joystick works in port 2 or port 1, and the keyboard works too, so the game plays well in any emulator.