Robocop Prime

[Gryzor]

Do let us know of the mobile game What platform will it be on?

[Carnivius]

Do let us know of the mobile game What platform will it be on?

Android to begin with cos Apple are greedy.  Already paid my $20 lifetime developer fee to Google months ago to publish on Android.   Apple want $100 per year and to compile the finished product on an Apple Mac...  blargh.


Anyways been doing some RoboCop stuff lately too.  I really wanna show off some stuff but they're not quite ready yet.  I will say though it's not totally linear like the original games and there are also automatic scrolling shooty sections involving him in his car (since the majority of graphics are already used in the main levels themselves why not re-use them in different gameplay variations?).  And I'm using the photofit concept but within main gameplay areas (instead of it being a completely seperate mini-game level) so you will occasionally have to track down and interrogate suspects and follow clues to find the right guys and evidence to close certain cases.

I have a newer PC since I last posted in this topic and I'm gonna be making a new video of the game so far too.  Just want to clean up bits and make it as bug free as possible to show off.

[Carnivius]

Took a screenshot anyways of me messing with the driveyshooty stuff.   Not sure how fast this would end up on real CPC.  May be ways to make it more efficient for speed reasons.   Anyways here you go.



Background might need to be more simple on the driving levels to cope with the larger sprites like the cars. Maybe black out that area where the vehicles drive along and do some sorta fade up to a more detailed top. Don't think that makes sense but I'll try some ideas.

[seanb]

Love it.

Don't forget to record any glitches you come across 

[Carnivius]

Now this bg idea may work better for the car sections. Black area for big sprites & can do simple parallax.

Yes I know it kinda looks like Robo is just shooting innocent bikers from behind. Just go with it for now.

[seanb]

I like that.
Looks like a whole new level and he's on the motorway not in the city centre.

[Zoe Robinson]

This is looking great!

[Carnivius]

I like that.
Looks like a whole new level and he's on the motorway not in the city centre.

Right.  And the only new tiles are the orange-tinted road tiles and the only new sprite is the lamppost (which would scroll in time with the lampposts over the top of the far away backdrop for a nice sense of depth).  And the road layer would scroll the fastest (which is why the road lines are useful there to help with the impression of speed, cos the regular road tile is only 4 Mode 0 pixels wide and wouldn't look like it's scrolling at all if it was scrolling the same speed of the width of the tile... if that makes sense).

I was having trouble thinking what could be shooting at RoboCop from higher up (need some reason to not be shooting horizontally) cos the window bad guys won't really work on that highway looking backdrop but I thought ehhh... let's have some lil flying drone things eh?  Simple to do, takes up hardly any memory since not much if any animation is needed and gives RoboCop a reason to fire directly up or diagonally too while in the car and I can re-use them in the walking levels too.

Also gonna use the car highway'level' in a couple of different ways.  Regular full shooty/drivey levels like what you see there but also very brief transition scenes just showing the car driving from the left to off the screen at the right (with some scrolling) with it then changing to a walk level with the car pulling up at the start of the level and Robo getting out to walk as it has been shown since the very first video I did.    Got a few other ideas for variations on it too (for example the black area means ED-209's walk sprites, which take up a fair amount of space, would be easier to do there than on a more busy background as it wouldn't have any varied background tiles to keep redrawing as he moves)

[seanb]

How about a helicopter to shoot at.
It could come in take a few hits and fly off.
could come back with battle damage on.

I understand memory constraints but if during these bits you remove the bikers could it work or is it too ambitious for our beloved cpc.

[Carnivius]

How about a helicopter to shoot at.
It could come in take a few hits and fly off.
could come back with battle damage on.

I understand memory constraints but if during these bits you remove the bikers could it work or is it too ambitious for our beloved cpc.

It might be possible but at what size?   A helicopter would be a pretty huge sprite if in scale with the cars and bikes and would be up in the sky where the background tiles are rather than in the more simple black lower section.    I coooould have just the very bottom section of the helicopter appear with the bottom half of enemies standing on the landing skids shooting at Robo and before jumping down onto Robo's car (or the back end of an enemy car that's mostly off screen to the right before they use the Cobra Assault Cannon to try take out Robo's car.  And have a noisy sound effect to signify the unseen rotor blades and you just shoot the bottom of the copter to make it start exploding at which point it moves off the top of the screen and the helicopter is then represented by a small sprite in the background crashing.  That could be cool and certainly a lot easier than having a huge helicopter sprite taking up all that space and slowing the game down to a crawl.    Definitely an option, thanks for the idea. 

[seanb]

You read my mind 

[Gryzor]

I thought of a heli as an end-of-level boss...

[Carnivius]

Just a few pics to show it's still in development.

Dialogue box portraits of RoboCop and the main villain (whom I have not yet named)


Robo going to his local convienence store.



(broke the enemy AI aiming here which is why the window guy isn't aiming down at robocop.  I'll fix it later hehe)

[ervin]

Stunning work as always.


The unnamed villain looks like a younger version of Clarence!

[sigh]

The portrait of Robocop is full of lovely goodness.

[Carnivius]

The unnamed villain looks like a younger version of Clarence!

It was supposed to look like another actor but looking at it with fresh eyes today I'm not sure it was all that successful.     Oh well, it's still a decent portrait and you can tell he's not a particularly nice guy so it'll do.

[invent]

Excellent work Carnivac, thanks for the update


I'm enjoying looking at how you have used the CPC colour palette.

[VincentGR]

True art as always 

[Lazy Dude]

This game looks more exiting everytime I take a look at whats going on.
Like the idea of a bad dude sitting on the helicopter skids to shoot at , or drive away from (attempt to!!) if you are out of ammo!

[TFM]

Well, we all know that the bad guy is the good guy in reality, because RoboCop serves a corrupt blood-sucking system. So it's a great idea to help the 'bad guy' a little more. It also makes the game more fun. 

[Ast]

Just splendid !

[Lazy Dude]

Now this bg idea may work better for the car sections. Black area for big sprites & can do simple parallax.

Yes I know it kinda looks like Robo is just shooting innocent bikers from behind. Just go with it for now.

just an idea, what about the odd street lamp thats not working. Would break up the repettetive backdrop and you could loose a few of the shaded buildings for a bit.

[Carnivius]

just an idea, what about the odd street lamp thats not working. Would break up the repettetive backdrop and you could loose a few of the shaded buildings for a bit.

The light sprite for the lamps covers up the fact there is no actual lamp tile and it's placement there also makes it appear like the streetlamps overlap the city backdrop which is scrolling slower than the next section (the lamppost part below the street light sprite down to where those bricks/arches fade to black.

The background city looking repetitive is just for now so that the parallax is working.  I can make it a bit more varied but it's not going to look spectacular as it's mainly just window dressing for the large sprite action lower down.  If, when porting to a real CPC, more variety can be done then I'll look into it then.  Just want to know the CPC can run that level type at a decent speed.

[Lazy Dude]

yeh, you totally got to love a decent cpc game that can have tons of baddies on one screen without slowing down the action. It means I can spend more time shooting and less time swearing at them!!

[Carnivius]

Yeah.  As for the 'on foot' stages it's not really doing much the original CPC game didn't (roughly same amount of sprites on screen).  Trying to use it as a reference for what I hope I can eventually pack in when the true CPC coded version is produced.  I expect the CPC coders on this forum know enough tricks to do various things that weren't commonly known back then in regards to sprite movement, scrolling and compression.