UPDATE (Sept 27th 2013): This was recently revived from the grave, three years after finally cancelling the game. Download is available at http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/455/45582.html

Ok, so I have been working on this for a while but I was waiting before announcing it here because I wanted to get most of the engine done first, but here's my newest calculator project: Supersonic Ball.

It's a simple platform game written in Axe language where you control a bouncing ball. The goal is to reach the end of each tunnel-like levels in a limited amount of time. Due to the way levels are made, they are pretty small in size, which will make it very easy to create them and they will be very small in size.

There will also be high scoring. To get the highest score, you need to finish levels as fast as possible. In the final version, you will be able to restart from the last level you finished (or maybe the last completed world), but to get the highest score, you better start from LV 1.

The engine also supports animated tiles and parralax scrolling. The background scrolling speed can be defined for each levels, as well as the animation speed. Due to the way animated tiles works, you can also do plenty of weird effects for each level.

Here are some screenshots so far, showing some of the effects in action. The last one shows the timer that was recently added as well:





Currently progress is slow, but I have a week of vacation coming soon, so I should probably be able to finish some more levels and hopefully find a title screen idea.

Looks like a pretty fun game to me, DJ! Those are quite the seizure-inducing screenshots, though. I look forward to seeing more information about the game as it progresses, and the font on that timer looks quite nice as well.

Haha yeah, I'll probably need to be careful if I decide to include the effect in screenshot #3 in the final version, like putting a warning for people who use an emulator, so they don't play too close from the screen if their emu refresh state is set too high.

As for the game speed, I am not sure yet, but I may add a mode where it refreshes the screen at a lower framerate. It would be quite handy for TI-Nspire users, because on the crappy TI-Nspire LCD, certain levels were rather blurry. :S

Meh, I believe that based on lots of reading up on LCD types when calc84 and I were researching the topic. How fast is the nominal framerate at this point? It looked slightly slower than I'd expect for something like that, unless I'm underestimating the overhead from rendering the full animated background on every frame.

Well I was worried it was coming, but I'm sorry to announce that Supersonic Ball is no longer being developed. I kinda lost interest in July and decided to take a break from programming for a while. I am including the source code in this post for Axe programmers who would like to mess around with it.

Source Code

If you use it, please give credits to me and Quigibo (he optimized it back in June or July). I might eventually re-use the code in a similar project but if this gets revived in any way it will be taken in another direction. (Maybe a top-down view version of it instead, but I would need to figure out Axe tile-mapping)

Sorry for those who were looking forward for this project.

Don't worry I'm sticking around. Metroid II: Evolution might just have been my final full calculator game release in the community, as everything made afterward were either remakes/expansion sets of previous games or cancelled projects.

Awww, I'm sorry to hear it, DJ; this looked like it would be a cool project. I do hope that someone else will pick it up at some point, including you, because it had quite some potential

Yeah to be fair, I just didn't knew in which direction to take it anymore. It was cool due to the speed, but there weren't a lot of things I could do yet due to being new to Axe Parser and I was still recovering from Sept-Oct 2009 real life issues at the time and had other things that occured so I was not really in the mood to code anymore. The way I would have taken the project would have made it kinda repetitive after a while, a problem I have when coding stuff, even some RPGs. I also had other ideas in mind, but I prefer to wait a bit more until I am in a coding mood again. Maybe I should go with another small RPG... I also need to experiment with new Axe functions that were added since version 0.2.6 as well as sound.

Sounds like a solid plan. I love the community, so I try to keep making new stuff when my schedule permits, but over the last few weeks that's unfortunately been an impossibility, hence why a public beta of Doors CS 7.1 keeps getting pushed backwards. I think smaller projects are definitely more mentally manageable when you're not in the mood to do some serious coding but are willing to devote a few hours to something that you'll feel accomplished about when you finish but won't have invested a massive amount of time into.

In an Omnimaga news that was posted three and half a years ago, we justified any possible length of time (even 16 years) as an acceptable hiatus for a calculator project. However, this time, for one TI-83 Plus/84 Plus game in particular, it will finally have taken 12 fewer years before project necromancy happens to it.

Tonight, I am proud to announce that Supersonic Ball v1.0 has been completed, after 3.5 years of hiatus, and has been released a few days ago!



This project was started in July 2010, back in the early days of Axe Parser, but went into hiatus until September 2013. Supersonic Ball is a simple side-scrolling platformer/tunnel hybrid where you control a bouncing ball, guiding it to the end of each level. Challenge lies in getting through narrow areas or climbing stuff without bouncing back, and it gets progressively harder to do so as the game progresses. The game features physics, randomized levels, animated graphics (or sometimes grayscale), smooth scrolling and parallax backgrounds. Try to get as far as possible as fast as you can without running out of time to get the highest score!

The game runs in 6 MHz mode, except during level loading, so it will work on all monochrome TI-83+/84+ models, although minor lag will occur on the black 83+ model when switching levels.

Although this is officially my final Axe project, this is definitively not gonna be my last calculator game ever. After a 2 years hiatus from programming in general, the announcment of the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition revived my interest again, although I am planning to stick with TI and HP BASIC from now on. Recently, I also released a fast color Tunnel clone for the HP Prime, a port of my HP 39gII version released earlier this year.

Download Supersonic Ball v1.0 (link to original post)

I downloaded Supersonic Ball and it has become the new hit at school. It is the most addicting thing since cookie clicker. Great Job!

are those amazing seizuristic tileset still with us?

this game is pretty original, i love it! great work, DJ_Omnimaga!

Thanks, and LuxenD, sadly the one with the star background scrolling vertically isn't. With the current version of the engine, such effect is no longer possible. The flashy screenshot level is still there, though, although of course on a real calc it's not that flashy (it looks identical, but with no backlight a seizure would be pretty much impossible )