December’s Program: Thyime

December is upon us and Thyime is the last program of the month for 2012. My how quick the year has passed. Thyime’s elements include moving, shooting, a break through wall, and a moving enemy. It does all this while remaining fast. Thyime provides a decent game to close out the year.

I wrote Thyime in 1984 and is actually written well. Again, it mixes many game mechanics together while remaining fast. It does this by using loops to avoid having to manage the enemy or wall’s movement. The only thing the main routine manages is your movement and if you fire. The fire mechanism is actually managed by a subroutine. This subroutine runs separately from the main loop so it doesn’t impact the movement. Because of this, the fire routine is also fast. That routine also handles breaking through the wall as well as the hit routine on the enemy. To make things interesting, each time you succeed in destroying the enemy the game speeds up.

Looking back on this program I’m pleased at how this turned out. It has a nice look, good play mechanics, and interesting code. It isn’t perfect, but no program is. It would be interesting to code this with MCODER and have the fire and movement code work together. Unfortunately, it would change the way the program plays. With that, I wouldn't make a change as you should enjoy Thyime as is.

If you want to run this program on your Android phone or tablet you can download a compressed copy of the program to your device. You’ll need to save the .p version of the program to your device to allow Zed Ex (Beta) to run it.