Advanced Binman Simulator

For whatever reason, I guess because they’re big and exciting and regularly stop outside the window, my nephew is, or at least was, very into bin lorries. Once a relative bought him a present and when giving it to him told his parents “I’m sorry, I wanted to get a spaceship but they’d run out so I had to get this bin truck” and I don’t think she ever really believed us that this was better. I mean, you wouldn’t, would you?

This game is in the vein of ZX Spectrum classics like Paperboy, not least in that it’s far too hard. I intended to balance it later, but it never quite caught his imagination like Legally Distinct Emergency Dog so that still hasn’t really happened.

The drawing code is kind of interesting on this one: to keep the 2:1 diagonal road from jittering, the screen scrolls in increments of two pixels, and to keep this from causing the truck to jitter, the truck also moves in increments of two pixels.

Sprites are drawn in order of their position, not in order of type or when they spawn, which was a challenge.

Also, the truck can’t move directly left or right. This was intended to add some realism, but honestly it just feels broken, and anyway, you can always accomplish the same thing with two diagonal moves, so really it’s just messing the player about for no reason.