I’m gonna officially post the file on the TI 99/4A forums tomorrow, but for all intents and purposes, Rabbits and Robots is finally done. This marks the first TI game crossed off my vaunted 2024 to-do list, and one of four to be released on cassette tape soon as part of BASIC Pak 1.
If you missed any of the other thrilling updates, this game has been designed to run on an unexpanded 16K computer in its native BASIC language, which can be painfully slow. Thus, it’s more of a board game vibe. I’m mostly pasting in copy from the manual for this update, partly to explain the game and partly because I’m tired and I’m already into deep waters on the next couple posts for this week.
Enjoy the clip! If you want to play the game but don’t have access to a TI 99/4A emulator or any idea how such a thing would work, drop me a line. I might be able to scare up a web-based solution that’ll at least work on a desktop browser for you.
(The “giant asterisk” above just means I have a bit of play-testing left to do, and that huge bugs in the code can sometimes show themselves weeks after I consider the game “done.” Hopefully I’ll be well into the next thing by then and it’ll be an easy fix!)
It's a simple assignment, they said. You'll be done in no time, they said.
They sent you to the edge of the valley with five obsolete maintenance bots. All you had to do was build conduits across the valley. Energy pulses travel from one side to the other along the conduits. You pack up, come home and get paid.
Then you saw the rabbits.
They looked a little weird, but they seemed just like your typical fuzzy bunnies. Sure, they ate a lot of grass, and seemed to leave scorched earth in their wake, and yes, there were a lot of them, but how big of a problem could the little furry rodents be?
Then you saw holes in your conduit before your first robot had even reached the other side of the valley. Then you saw your readings go haywire as they smashed into your 'bots. And still they came. More and more and more of them.
Pretty soon, you realized someone in the head office didn't like you.
RABBITS AND ROBOTS is a 1-player strategy game for the Texas Instruments TI 99/4A home computer. It is written in TI BASIC and designed to be playable on an unexpanded 99/4A, loaded from cassette tape.
OBJECT:
Use your five robots to build red channels across the screen from left to right, allowing pulses to go from left to right unimpeded. Rabbits in the playfield move at random and will wreck the red channels and damage the robots.
GAMEPLAY:
The game takes place on a rectangular playfield, the green valley you need to traverse. Your five robots are stationed on the western edge. Fifteen rabbits spawn and begin munching grass. Every tile they "eat" turns yellow as they leave it.
The rabbits move at random, eating. If two rabbits collide, both are killed, and new rabbits will respawn, either this round or the next one, in a random location on the playfield. A "+5" powerup will appear at their last location, which will give the player five more moves in that day if picked up. Rabbits can mulch over the +5 powerup and it will disappear.
Rabbits are allowed to 'wrap' around the screen, but robots are not. (Teleporting bunnies that can eat metal? There must be something in the water around here.)
If a rabbit traverses a yellow tile, nothing changes. If it lands on a green one, it eats all the grass and turns it yellow. If a rabbit walks onto a red conduit, it turns that space yellow as well, and energy pulses can no longer pass through that tile. If a rabbit collides with a robot while it is moving, it dies, but the robot takes 20 points of damage.
When the rabbits are done, it's the robots' turn to move. You get ten moves per day (turn). Each movement takes one move, as does picking a new robot. If your robot walks onto a green tile, it will turn red, indicating a successful piece of conduit has been built. If the robot walks onto a yellow tile, it will be turned green (re-seeded with grass) and you'll have to walk on it again to build.
Robots cannot walk on the gray border tiles, and will incur 5% damage running into them if they try. Conduits need only be built to touch the eastern side - or, in a pinch, a robot standing in the spot can bridge a gap.
If a robot steps on a rabbit, it's a bloody fight to the finish with lasers and karate. Just kidding - maybe in the sequel! The rabbit is killed instantly, but the robot takes 10% damage (all that fur gums up the moving parts). Another rabbit will respawn at a random location in this turn or the following one.
This isn't the most fast-paced of games, so two robots colliding by accident should be fairly rare. However, in desperate situations, you can crash one robot into another, which will cause all tiles around them to turn red, kill any rabbits on those tiles, and teleport the robots back to their starting tiles, each with a 50% loss of health.
After the rabbits and robots each have a turn, the power grid will attempt to fire five energy pulses across the valley, starting from the five tiles where the robots started. They will travel eastward, and can turn left or right if blocked, but they cannot backtrack. If they are blocked, or move north and south too many times, they simply fizzle out of existence - no damage is done by the pulse at any point. Pulses can pass through a red tile, or through a robot, only.
At the end of each day, after the energy pulses have fired, any robot in one of the five 'docking ports' on the western edge (the spaces where they started) will recover 10% health, to a maximum of 100. If a robot reaches 0% it is broken and cannot move again. If all five robots reach 0%, the game is over.
A completed circuit (an energy pulse that makes it across the valley) adds (100 x DAY) points to the player’s score, so the further into the game you can get pulses across, the more lucrative they’ll be. There is no penalty for pulses that don't make it. However, after five rounds, a Power Goal will be set, which will then gradually increase as the game continues.
When all five robots have malfunctioned, or when your Power Rate falls below the Power Goal, the game is over. Player scores 100 points for each day survived, plus their score earned for each successfully transmitted pulse.
Player can check the health of all five robots, or see their current score, by pressing H or S during gameplay. These options do not subtract from the total moves in that turn.
STRATEGY TIPS:
a dead robot can still conduct energy pulses, and rabbits who run into it will still die, so planning a conduit around one of your fallen comrades gives you a ‘safe’ tile and one less thing to worry about
focus on building a conduit several tiles wide, to make it more likely that pulses can still make it across even if rabbits damage one side or the other
conduits from the top and bottom launch points can ‘feed into’ a common conduit across
do not take the rabbits home. Metal-eating, teleporting, robot-attacking, eternally voracious valley rabbits are a lifetime commitment, not a cute Easter present
Manual © 2024 Keith Bergman for Orphantech.