[alecu]

Follow-ups to the LD60 Circular Arcade games (after #182).

Catch the Robots: wall outlines in their own tilemap

The maze's bright outlines kept going missing. On a TUNNEL layer the renderer walks a tile column one texel row at a time, and several rows can land on the same LED; the last one drawn wins. So a one-pixel outline on the rim side of a wall was painted over by the fill just inside it.

The walls are now two tilemaps over the same cells, scrolled together: the dark fill (tiles.png), then the outlines on a clear background (outlines.png). Nothing in the outline tilemap draws after an outline, so it always shows.

• The fill strip repeats one frame 16 times so it can read the same autotile indices. Wrapping frame indices isn't documented, so the code doesn't rely on it.
• Sharing the cells means the only memory cost is that 1 KB strip.

Spiral Tunnel: rocks in the walls

Six rock tiles (a rock with a lit side, or a few pebbles) follow the slope tiles. When the tunnel is drawn, each solid wall cell gets a random one of them half the time. Now you can see which way the walls are moving. Rock tiles are solid wall, so collisions are unchanged.

Fuller Spiral Tunnel and Defender icons

• Spiral Tunnel: the tunnel is 13–16 tiles wide and the icon is 8, so the old icon showed only the tips of the walls. The capture tool can now paint the whole map, not just the camera's view. It can also squeeze the window, cutting rows that are empty all the way across from between the walls. Nothing drawn is cut; the walls just come closer together.
• Defender: the autopilot now flies down and then left into a crowd of aliens, so five are on the ship's left.
• Both capture options are off unless a moment asks for them. The other three icons come out byte for byte the same.

Tests

• Maze: the outline tilemap shares the fill's cells, is drawn after it and before the sprites, and scrolls with it.
• Rocks: about half the solid wall gets a rock, every kind appears, and rocks count as wall.
• Suite and build: tests/test_ld60_games.py passes and mpy-cross compiles both changed games.

Not yet seen on the real disc: how the outlines and rocks read on the LEDs.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code