I'm inspired by the classic Mac game, Glider, which you should play if you haven't, and also by the new homebrew games, especially games like Qb(*) and Marble Craze, which fly in the face of the fact that the Atari was designed to play Pong and Combat - it even has hardware registers for the "ball" and "player 1 missile," the purpose of which must be perverted to make the Atari play other types of games.

The name "Belling the Cat" comes from the Aesop fable, but the concept came from the design; I wanted a game with destructible walls, with a two-player cooperative mode, and with subtle gameplay. Mice seemed obvious player characters for eating holes in walls and for cooperative play, and the walls themselves allowed some subtle effects to come through; a cat can hear mice at work in a wall, but can't see through it to know exactly where they are.

April 11, 2004: I started drawing this one before I knew much about how Atari 2600 graphics work - and it shows! There are too many layers, too many color changes (and too precisely timed), and the overlapping pattern of bricks at the top wouldn't reflect right (which I realized as I was drawing it). Besides, this is uuugly.

April 21, 2004: I thought I could use a sprite doubling trick to make mouse sprites wider than 8 pixels, but I re-thought this later, when I realized everything else that has to go into this game:

May 15, 2004: Decided to stick with a side-view of the cat, mostly because my attempts at a top-view were unrecognizeable; eight pixels long and one color doesn't leave much room for a tail. I drew a whole new set of cat animations based on the cute "ear-to-floor" frame I drew a few weeks ago. I'm really glad Photoshop CS added the pixel aspect ratio feature, it makes the Atari's squashed (1.6 times width to height for NTSC) pixels bearable to work with. I thought about making the game a vertical scroller, with the fire button actually doing something - jump - so that the mouse has to climb up furniture and stairs and so on to climb floors, but right now, I just want to get a first game finished, so I'm keeping it simple. Maybe in "Hickory Dickory II..." Entered bitmaps for all of the mouse frames into the binary. I still don't know how I'm going to do two players simultaneously, since the cat is a player graphic.

August 2, 2004 notes:

August 2 & 3, 2004 notes:

September 9, 2004 notes: