Good Afternoon ! It's a great day here at Applecart and let's see what the results are for this week.

I'm thinking it may have been the screen that turned away several programmers this week as we only have one entry for the "3D Space Dock" program. Despite there being only 2-moving objects at a time, it apparently was too much for other coders to wrap their heads around, and that's fine.

This idea was perhaps one of the first as a way of tackling the complexity of how to handle drawing something 3-dimensional on the Apple ][ computer for its day.

Fortunately I understood it. And I dutifully wrote a cart trying to keep the original spirit of the game with the only exception it checks to ensure that if you are hit from the front view either by the rogue asteroid or collision with the still ones, that it must also occur in the side view.

So you can't have a situation that cries collision when the front view hits the moving asteroid and the side view hits the stable asteroid. In the original game that was considered a collision, but not in the cart I wrote. You must be hit by the same object on both screens.

Here is the video for that cart:

And the Pico-8 cart to meet this challenge can be found HERE:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=36594

So what have we covered so far ? Quite a bit !

This next week's challenge is going to be a bit more difficult. Easier in some ways, more difficult in others.

Easier in the fact that it will be a turn-based puzzle, more difficult in that ultimately you will be moving more than just 2-objects at a time.

The name of this Apple ][ game is called, "PENSATE" and operates a little like chess. A little.

The object of the game is to take your piece from one side of the board, the bottom, and move it up to the top. You can move U D L R per move. To stop you will be other pieces on the board going from left to right, right to left, up to down, down to up, or more intelligent than this !

You're in luck ! I uploaded my Apple screen to video HERE:

As you can see the player makes 1-move to start with, but later levels 2 or more, and then the enemies make as many moves themselves to compensate.

What I propose is this, make this game, use the original images if you like, but only have enemies that are relatively easy to code. Perhaps three enemies for the first level, four for the second, five for the third, etc.

Maybe grant the player 3-lives and they gain a level every 2-levels.

Game could be concluded after level 8, for then there would be 10 opponents all bip-bopping around on the board.

Enemies could consist of single arrows facing a direction, moving randomly in a cross, moving randomly diagonally. They travel in that direction after the player makes their move. If for instance the arrow was LEFT and it moved LEFT off of the board, have them reappear to the far right to move left again when it's their turn.

The ones that wander randomly could also wrap around the screen, but not the player.

Any collision with the player counts as a hit and takes away one of the player's men. Lose all men, game over. Could score according to points. 10 for first level, 20 for second level, 30 for third, etc. so on the fourth level the player would have 60 points.

You can find more information on this Apple ][ cart as well as instructions HERE:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/apple2/pensate

That's it ! Feel free to ask questions on how to proceed if need be. I will also be working on my tribute and version to return next week.

Hope to see you there !