My CPCRetroDev2015 entry - RUN"CPC"

[AMSDOS]

Who else is participating, anything known already?

Morri I think, only Morri knows that! 

[Morri]

Morri I think, only Morri knows that! 

I won't be able to enter now. My game has turned into a bloated mess  so I've had to make it a 128kb disc game which takes me out of the comp.
Have no fear though, I am still working on it and will update the Let's Go thread now as not to overrun @Ervin 's thread.

[ervin]

If you have some time then add some eye candy. That's what I did learn from the ROM competition. Only few people will appreciate your work actually (that's the ones who can code Z80), the majority will not understand how your great creation actually works and just judge 'by eyeball'.
What I've seen from your side is imho to be the winner, but they may have another POV. Give them some nice loading screen, so to make the first impression well.

And wasn't there something like '5 Extrapoints for a connection to a movie'. You could put something little in your loading screen.

Who else is participating, anything known already?

Yes, I think you may be right.
I'll see what I can do.

I have an idea for a connection to BTTF... quite a simple idea that might be very effective.

Not sure who else is competing.
The Spanish guys are all in stealth mode.
Really looking forward to seeing the other entries - there were some great games in last year's comp.

[ervin]

I won't be able to enter now. My game has turned into a bloated mess  so I've had to make it a 128kb disc game which takes me out of the comp.
Have no fear though, I am still working on it and will update the Let's Go thread now as not to overrun @Ervin 's thread.

Oh no, that's a pity!
Regardless, I'm really looking forward to your game. It's looking great.

[AMSDOS]

I won't be able to enter now. My game has turned into a bloated mess  so I've had to make it a 128kb disc game which takes me out of the comp.
Have no fear though, I am still working on it and will update the Let's Go thread now as not to overrun @Ervin 's thread.

I remember "The Eternal Light" having no chance of becoming a 64k game, though I cannot remember why that was, even after the tune had been removed. Must of been size of the game & levels. I'm presuming Let's Go progressively gets harder and levels become larger, that would present problems if the game was to become a Multi-load (if you read my earlier comments in the other thread). Otherwise a fixed portion of memory set aside for your level data in the main 64k, could be simply loaded in when required.

[ervin]

Hi folks.

A little update on the BTTF connection.
For the last 2 nights I've been trying to draw a Delorean, to use as the player sprite!

Due to my cr@p pixel skills, it took a while.
Here's how it looks.

Dropbox - delorean.png

I was really happy with how it turned out... until I put it into a screenshot of my game.
It looked completely out of place.


In addition to that, I'd have to rewrite some graphic routines to accommodate it, as the tile routines for my player sprite have been written with a chunkier sprite in mind. That's not such a problem of course, however my tile definition table is just about full, and it would require some serious thinking to find a way of putting the Delorean in.

So, with just over 4 weeks to go, I need to think carefully about what I can afford to do, in terms of how much time I have left.

So the Delorean will not go into the game, and therefore my game will not have a BTTF reference.


Those bonus points would have come in handy.
Ah well.

It's not all bad news though, as I have a player sprite I am very happy with, and that's the one we'll go with.
It's a chunky landspeeder type of thing, done in black and white pixels only.
It looks really good against the rush of colour going on around you.


Now I'm frantically trying to create a certain graphical effect, to represent what happens to the player sprite after a collision. Man, pixels are hard!

[McKlain]

Well, instead of a DeLorean you could have put Marty on a Hoverboard 

[ervin]

Well, instead of a DeLorean you could have put Marty on a Hoverboard 

I had actually considered that, believe it or not!
However, due to my useless pixel skills, I knew that there would be almost no point trying!

[TFM]

Probably RAM is running out anyway, but.... can the Delorian be an option, so the player can use it or another player sprite. Then you got the BTTF reference and two possible player sprites?

[Fessor]

Or, if the game gets a Highscoretable, the first place predefined with 1.21 Gigapoints as reference to 1.21 Gigawatt...

[TFM]

Or, if the game gets a Highscoretable, the first place predefined with 1.21 Gigapoints as reference to 1.21 Gigawatt...

You think that somebody will get that? 

[Fessor]

They want a reference, therefore they must know the movies. and that 1.21 is a famous number as 42
There are many references possibles if they are fans of the movies.
A possible obstacle could also be a manure heap. (as every member of the tannen family in every movie crashed into one)

*edit*
If the game is in style of the uploads from the first post or that space harrier thingy... why not a level in that rainy highway flying scene of bttf 2?
*/edit*

[Singaja]

Including some quotes / character names in top 10 default highscore should do the trick. Lots of games did it

[ervin]

Probably RAM is running out anyway, but.... can the Delorian be an option, so the player can use it or another player sprite. Then you got the BTTF reference and two possible player sprites?

That's a really great idea... but I don't think I'll have time.

[ervin]

They want a reference, therefore they must know the movies. and that 1.21 is a famous number as 42
There are many references possibles if they are fans of the movies.
A possible obstacle could also be a manure heap. (as every member of the tannen family in every movie crashed into one)

*edit*
If the game is in style of the uploads from the first post or that space harrier thingy... why not a level in that rainy highway flying scene of bttf 2?
*/edit*

That's a great idea as well, but I almost certainly won't have time to implement a level that is so specifically styled. 

[ervin]

Including some quotes / character names in top 10 default highscore should do the trick. Lots of games did it

Hmmm... now THAT is something I might be able to do something with, in the time I have left.
If I have any spare time once the rest of the game is finished, I'll implement this.
Fingers crossed!

In other news, I now have a lovely colourful explosion when the player collides with an obstacle!

[ervin]

Hi everyone.

I now have a game-over sequence I'm very happy with.
It's really just a bunch of explosions, but it looks very cool within the context of the game.

I've also started to experiment with sound.
Arkos Tracker is really cool!
I've never used it before, but it takes me back to the days of Sound Tracker etc. on the Amiga.
Ah, happy days.

I just need to figure out how to play sound fx and music using cpctelera.
It looks easy enough from the instructions, but I haven't actually tried it yet...

In other news, I've been going over the gameplay in my mind for almost 2 weeks, struggling with some concepts.
- What's to stop the player from simply going around obstacles, thereby making the game too easy? (I can't have too many obstacles on the screen at once due to performance concerns, so level design is a bit challenging).
- How do I keep the gameplay interesting?
- How do I give the game a reason for existing?

Well... earlier today I was chatting to a friend about it at work, and he casually offered a suggestion, and I said, "YES! THAT'S BRILLIANT!!!".

The basic idea is that to progress to the next level, players will be forced to play dangerously.
They will have to fly through the gaps in obstacles, or between obstacles, in order to score points.
After scoring a certain number of points, the next level will begin.

Of course, a collision will be instant "game over".


I think/hope this idea will make the game more than just a glorified tech demo, and it shouldn't be too difficult or time-consuming to implement.

[TFM]

ok, I just stay in Level 1 then 

[ervin]

ok, I just stay in Level 1 then 

[ervin]

YEEHAA!!!

I've got some (really bad!) music playing on my title screen now!
I'm surprised how easy it was to get it working.

The one thing that tripped me up was to make sure (when exporting to BIN) that I export my arkos tracker song to the address it will reside at in my program.
Once I figured that out, it worked!

Now I can add some equally bad sfx!

[ervin]

Wow... that was frustrating!
For the last couple of evenings I've been stuck on ONE BUG.


It only occurred very occasionally, and was very hard to reproduce.
It took a heck of a lot of debugging, but I finally narrowed it down to one function.
And in that function, under a very specific circumstance, another function was being called one time too many - but only very occasionally.

It came down to the simple mistake of not initialising a variable during my initGame() routine.
A simple mistake that caused hours of frustration!

Ah, the joys of programming!


Oh, incidentally, solving this lead to another little optimisation I discovered whilst debugging.
So something good came out of it then!

[AMSDOS]

Wow... that was frustrating!
For the last couple of evenings I've been stuck on ONE BUG.


It only occurred very occasionally, and was very hard to reproduce.
It took a heck of a lot of debugging, but I finally narrowed it down to one function.
And in that function, under a very specific circumstance, another function was being called one time too many - but only very occasionally.

It came down to the simple mistake of not initialising a variable during my initGame() routine.
A simple mistake that caused hours of frustration!

Ah, the joys of programming!


Oh, incidentally, solving this lead to another little optimisation I discovered whilst debugging.
So something good came out of it then!

Thought I was the only 1 that did that! 

[TFM]

Wow... that was frustrating!
For the last couple of evenings I've been stuck on ONE BUG.


It only occurred very occasionally, and was very hard to reproduce.
It took a heck of a lot of debugging, but I finally narrowed it down to one function.
And in that function, under a very specific circumstance, another function was being called one time too many - but only very occasionally.

It came down to the simple mistake of not initialising a variable during my initGame() routine.
A simple mistake that caused hours of frustration!

Ah that's nothing. Once I had a bug, it took me over 3 weeks to track it down. Even gave it a name: TRI. I thought I get mad, but at the end I found it the TRI (track register increase) happens only with 6128 Plus 3" drives when changing the track before the FDC did read all GAP#3 bytes. After that I had to explain the problematic to a bunch of coders. Still now once in a while somebody suffers from the TRI bug. So if you solved an occasional appearing bug in days only: My congratulations, great work!!! 

[ervin]

Ah that's nothing. Once I had a bug, it took me over 3 weeks to track it down. Even gave it a name: TRI. I thought I get mad, but at the end I found it the TRI (track register increase) happens only with 6128 Plus 3" drives when changing the track before the FDC did read all GAP#3 bytes. After that I had to explain the problematic to a bunch of coders. Still now once in a while somebody suffers from the TRI bug. So if you solved an occasional appearing bug in days only: My congratulations, great work!!! 

Wow, that's amazing persistence - 3 weeks!
I guess when you REALLY want to do something, you'll find a way to do it!
I know the feeling all too well...

Although I have no idea about TRI, FDC and GAP bytes.

[TFM]

Praise the lord for that! Hahaha! (If you need FDC routines let me know).