Retro Game Coders

APRIL 29, 2022

So far in our STOS Programming Tutorial we have focused on text so now we should really exploit the graphical capabilities, STOS is a game programming language after all! Creating Your Pictures with Atari ST Drawing Apps. Back in the day there were a ton of Atari ST art packages but my personal favourites are Neo and Degas. I used to do my pixel art in Neo and general image editing in Degas.

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Retro Game Coders

APRIL 29, 2022

In the last part of this STOS BASIC Tutorial we loaded a sprite but it just sat there, let’s fix that … One of the ways that STOS BASIC helps us to build interactive programs and games is in the sprite movement features because they are not only easy, but they do their thing without our constant input. STOS checks and changes each sprite 50 times per second unless you tell it otherwise, and this happens on interrupts, independent of whatever your code is doing at the same time.

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Retro Game Coders

APRIL 29, 2022

Now we can move sprites in STOS we need to put things together to see how we can actually begin creating playable games. Along the way we will look at some more new features and concepts so you can understand more of how STOS works versus programming languages and game engines you might be used to. Avoid the Monster. As our first example, let’s create a minimalist bad-guy avoidance game.

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