The Lady (Atari 8-bit computers)

Instructions

A strong female gunsliger, known as the Lady, must fight and defeat three outlaws to survive. Press the right key before enemy shoots.

Development

Two years ago I noticed a nice C64 homebrew game called Tombstones (2017) by Megastyle. I liked it and I tought I could do something similar.

Atari 8-bit computers are 2.5 years older than C64 but nonetheless have some strenghts that I could have used, even considered the fact I am not a skilled coder.

Thanks to 16 shades of one color graphics mode, I decided to make the game look like old black and white western movies and I designed a smooth background.

Taking advantage of A8 widescreen and overscan features, there's a "cinemascope" screen and duelist enter from sides without borders.

Atari sprites have a limited horizontal width but unlimited height. Therefore I asked TIX if he could design tall characters; he made ninety 16x64 pixels 3 colors animation frames and smartly solved the problem of the deaths, not easy because of narrow sprites.

Regarding music, I asked Miker to make Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly main theme.

He always wanted to do it for Atari and in fact the result is really good.
Recently the Italian composer, one of the greatest and most influential film composers of all time, passed away and we would like to honor him.
Miker made victory (Johnny Cash Ballad of a Teenage Queen) and death tunes too. 

The game was programmed with DMSC's FastBasic for Atari 8-bit computers. Not only he made an awesome new language, but he helped me when I was stuck.

Sprites were designed with Paul Lay's Atari Player Editor and tunes were composed with Radek Sterba's Raster Music Tracker.

The game entered ABBUC Software Contest 2020 (7th place).

It runs on PAL and NTSC machines.