Seeing as a monitor more or less was the size of a fishtank, a few magazines published fish-tank programs. For some reason, when I first got my computer and saw there was a fish-tank program for the TRS-80, I became obsessed with making one for the C64. These were the original Sim's and Screen-savers in a sense. I figured with Gamemaker I could one-up what was out there, so away I went.
Yuck. Now that I look at it, why didn't I use more color for the sprites? All I can think of is maybe I was confused about limited number of background colors and sprite colors. I might have read something in the manual, thought all the sprites had to use the same palette (only one had to be shared) and consequently made everything brown and yellow. What a dumb little kid!
Anyway, this fishtank was based exactly on one a friend of mine had. The sucker fish slowly moves up and down. Bubbles come out of the airaetor and scuba-man. The frog drifts around aimlessly, and if he gets caught in the bubbles he gets bandied about. The angel fish (brown?) hides among the rocks. The sword-fish patrols back and forth and if anything gets in its way it moves faster, acting aggressively. Thats about it for the fish tank.
As you can see, this little proggie maxes out the Commodores limit of 8 sprites.
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