Open House

[joachim]

For reasons I can scarcely explain, I decided recently that it would be a fun weekend project to make a Beeb port of the old Flash game Open House published by Lifetime TV. This is a sort of light puzzle game where you drop bits of sectional sofa onto a grid and score points when you complete a coherent sofa. Because this is a rather easy goal, there are some annoying constraints and complicated scoring rules. Sort of like Pipe Mania for interior designers.

And, well, in the first weekend I did the first 90% of the project: rendering all the graphics almost legibly in MODE 2. And in the second weekend I did the second 90%, the game logic, and then I got sick and didn't do anything for a while, and now I've got around to doing enough of the third 90%, the UI, that it's possible to upload something that other people might be able to play.

Overall instructions: at each stage you are offered a choice of 4 sofa sections and must choose one of them, pay for it and place it on the grid. Every section must be placed next to another or next to a table, and a section must not have its front immediately blocked by another section. When you complete a sofa (a run of two or more adjacent sections correctly aligned, starting and ending with a corner and possibly also having intermediate corners) you score points. More points are scored for long sofas, sofas that adjoin tables, and sofas made of expensive materials. Sofas that are not all of the same material are allowed but score much less. You can score multiple times for the same sofa by extending it around a corner. The game ends when you can't afford any of your 4 options, and the object of the game is simply to have accrued the highest possible score at that time.

(There are quite a few rules in here that I keep thinking about changing — it's possible that one could make the same setting into a game with a significantly different flavour — but at the moment, almost all the rules are implemented to be the same as in the Flash game.)

Note: this version assumes BASIC II, mostly for the arithmetic routines, so won't run on B+/Master/etc.

[tricky]

Sounds interesting
Have you thought about adding nula support for more colourful, but probably less garish designs

[joachim]

Thanks tricky, and an excellent observation: of course VideoNuLA would be perfect for this. Is it supported by any emulator that I can run on my MacBook?

Designing the patterns was never going to be my strong point in any case (colour-blind), but they're just defined as an 8x8 texture that gets rendered onto whatever furniture (plus an outline colour) so I could relatively easily make them user-definable.

I've also just updated the SSD in the initial post, to fix a bug whereby the leftmost sofa option was occasionally rendered as the wrong piece in the options display.

[EdwardianDuck]

Thanks tricky, and an excellent observation: of course VideoNuLA would be perfect for this. Is it supported by any emulator that I can run on my MacBook?

B2 supports VideoNULA (at least as far as the colour palette goes) and runs on macOS. There's an option under Tools > Configs (scroll down to the bottom).

[Cybershark]

As you've had no other comments on the game then I felt I ought to.
This is a very fresh concept, which plays smoothly and is packed with colour - great use of multi-MODE split-screening there/. Takes a bit of getting to grips with the ins and outs, but worth the effort

Here's one of my best efforts so far:

I've also just updated the SSD in the initial post, to fix a bug whereby the leftmost sofa option was occasionally rendered as the wrong piece in the options display.

Fab! That was the only problem that I noticed while playing

[Cybershark]

Finding this quite addictive, and that's my new personal best on The Foyer

Only other comments I have to add are that I sometimes wish there was an undo option. Not looking to be able to take back every move but there are a few occasions where I've hit the keys a bit too fast and realised I've either dropped the wrong piece or I've put the piece I wanted just next to where I intended to drop it. So yeah, just the ability to take back the most recent move would be nice.
Alternately, an easy way to end the game - short of rebooting and losing your high score - would be lovely.

Do you happen to know if the original game is still available anywhere?

[joachim]

I'd also noticed that a way to quickly end a game was lacking, so it's already implemented in my latest development version which I attach. Press SHIFT+Esc or SHIFT+R to end the game.

The main other change in this version is that I've shrunk the screen width from 320 to 288 (i.e. 36 MODE1-characters). Partly for æsthetics, partly to free up 2k in a maximally compatible way (except for Electron users, they're going to hate this game, sorry).

You can play (some modern Javascript magic interpretation of) the original Flash game here: https://flashmuseum.org/openhouse/. As far as I know, there is one scoring rule which is different: a fun challenge for a certain kind of person might be to work out exactly what it is …