CHarth

An original block-shooting puzzle game for CHGame. Shapes made of green blocks creep down the screen towards your ship. Fire blocks up the columns to fill in the gaps, complete a whole shape and it explodes. Thirty hand-drawn shapes, a terminal-style look and a psytrance loop on the piezo. Every line of game code, picture, sprite and tune is original; the CHGame library in chgame/ is by Kevin Bates.

Controls

Control	Action
Left / Right	Move the ship
A or B	Fire a block
Down (hold)	Hurry the shapes down, eight times as fast
START	Pause menu: resume, save game, return to title
START (hold 3 s)	Back to the CHGame menu

Rules

• A block you fire flies straight up your column and sticks under the lowest block there. If the column is empty it flies off the top and is lost.
• Every shape hangs from a flat top, so every gap in it is open from below and can be filled.
• A shape clears only when it has been completed: the rectangle around it must be completely full, at least 2 x 2. The whole shape then explodes. Bigger shapes score more (the score grows with the square of its size, times the level).
• A block fired into a shape that is already exploding sticks as a loose block, so stop firing on a column the moment the shape is done. Nothing falls when a shape clears.
• If any block reaches the bottom row, the game is over. The PROX gauge shows how close the shapes are, and the floor flashes red when they get near.
• Every four shapes cleared is a new level: the shapes creep faster, grow taller and wider, and from level 5 the gaps between them shrink.

Shapes

The first two levels use only wide, flat shapes with a few small gaps, two to five shots each. Levels 3 and 4 mix in simple arches and castles. From level 5 on come thirty designs: arches, castles, combs, pyramids, valleys, crowns, twin towers, bridges and spikes, mirrored at random and getting a thicker top bar as the levels rise.

Saving

The best score is saved on its own. A game in progress is saved at the start of each level and from the pause menu (SAVE GAME). The title offers CONTINUE or NEW GAME when a save exists, and a lost game drops the saved game but keeps the best score. If the board cannot save, the pause menu says SAVING IS OFF.

Install

• On the SD card: copy dist/CHarth.CHG to GAMES\GAMES\ on your CHGame's card.
• As a package: dist/CHarth.chgame installs through the CHGame tools (chgame cart ...).
• Straight to the board: ./cl upload builds and flashes it.

Building

Needs the CHGame board package and the tools in chgame/ (vendored here). From this folder:

./cl build        compile and print the size
./cl upload       flash the board
./cl sim --free --frames 600 --png out/free --input "130:A,133:"    run it in the PC simulator

./cl build -D=-DCHARTH_DEMO=1 is not for play: it adds the autoplayer that records docs/gameplay.gif. The sprites come from tools/sprites.py (needs Python 3 with Pillow) (previews in art/) and the music from tools/music.py.

Credits and licence

The game is MIT-licensed (see LICENSE). It is built on CHGame by Kevin Bates (bateske), Apache-2.0, vendored unchanged in chgame/. The pixel art was drawn with a pixel-art generator and is covered by the same licence.