Bob and the Alien Fireflies game screen5
Bob and the Alien Fireflies is a Coco and Dragon port of an original game that the author (Peter Cullen) originally wrote for the Atari 2600 console using bAtari BASIC. He originally published it for the Atari on August 8, 2023 and updated that version on January 7, 2024. This was the very first game that Peter ever wrote; he has traditionally been much more of a hardware tinkerer. You can download his original Atari 2600 version of Bob and the Alien Fireflies here.
Since Peter has been active in the Coco community over the past few years with both an MC-10 and a Coco 2, and he was interested in trying machine language for the first time, he decided to choose his Coco with the 6809E processor as his first ever machine language project. Once he started getting the hang of the CPU and video chip, he quickly became addicted and kept working at it, including a two player simultaneous mode. The game features "sweeping teleport beams" that the player has to steer their hedgehog (which is what Bob is) through the openings that appear in the beams, and eat the fireflies. The fireflies change color after a bit of time; they start blue, then yellow and finally red. If they stay red too long, the player dies. The player does wraparound on the top and bottom of the screen, but not on the left or right. The player has to eat 16 of the fireflies to finish a level, and bonus points are awarded for each row of the same color in the 4 x 4 grid (shown at the bottom for each player) plus a bonus for clearing a level. Blue lines are worth the least (4 points), yellow the second (8 points) and red the most (12 points).
Title: Bob and the Alien Fireflies
Author: Peter Cullen (ported from his original Atari 2600 version)
Publisher: 8bitsinthebasement
Released: June 1, 2024
Requires: Color Computer 1,2 or 3, 32K RAM, joystick(s)
Download Bob and the Alien Fireflies for the Coco or Dragon 32/64 here. Including sourcecode!