Bionic Granny travels to the future

19th February 2010

Bionic Granny. Either you would have loved this game, or you would have hated it. Well, I played this Mastertronic classic yesterday for a laugh and decided to create a remix of the original Bionic Granny tune using DMC V4.0. I even did a rubbish SEUCK game based on Granny's antics yesterday as well. Am I terrible or what?

How did I come up with this silly SEUCK made after 1 - 2 hours? Well, basically, I was on an Instant Messenger client and mentioned that BMX NINJA was one of worse games to ever have hit the Commodore 64. But, little did I realise was that there were C64 games worse than that. That was of course Bionic Granny by Mastertonic in 1984. I tested the original Bionic Granny game for myself. It was complete and utter pants. It was one of those games you would have seen made with the Games Creator or Creations game maker tools. (The best game I ever saw made with this probably was Golden Head, an Indiana Jones style game).

As I was discussing with a friend on MSN messenger, I came to a very daft decision to bring back the infamous granny and create a tribute game. That's right fans, Bionic Granny is going to have the Crapcade Games makeover.

For any of you who wants to know what Crapcade Games is: Crapcade Games is a fun label where we give existing game titles a makeover just for fun. And try to make them better, unlike their crap counterparts.

However, although this game is going to be taking a makeover. The concept of the game will be simple, but more fun. For example, we will want some real action involved with this silly game, so the player shall have the opportunity to move Granny left/right (like in the original), but instead of running into the people she wants to whack with her cane. Pressing fire will activate the cane. There will also be a hidden quota. As soon as enough people have been hit by the cantankerous old lady, a coin will move downwards. If the player collects enough coins (by whacking enough people with the cane), they will move on to the next level. Also the speed for each character will depend on the level which you are on. Also planned is a front end with a different piece of music, with flip pages. First showing the credits, then the game instructions, then the high score table.

Anyway, today I got started on working on some in game graphics for this game. I used the Multi Screen Construction Kit utility to design my own screens for the game. It took a while for me to design those screens as I wanted to add some quite nice detail to the actual game's graphics. The result for outside the Mini Mart turned out quite nicely (See pic below).

Other level screens I designed using MSCK were the Park, School and Public Toilets. (I might do a boating port or pub if I get round to designing some more screens. It depends how well the first 4 levels will turn out. There could also be a possibility of some more screens later on if I can think of any more levels for the game. (Huge grin). Then I used the WinVice Monitor to capture all colour and screen data of this game and stored it to the .d64 using:

s "name of file" 8 (source add) (destination add) and that worked out well.

My next step was to make the game sprites. So I dug out the Sprite Editor V1.0 by demo group Faces and drew the characters (sprites) for the game, starting with the Bionic Granny frames (Look much better than the original Bionic Granny), then I drew the kids and lollipop lady and the spinning lollipops. The sprites part is still unfinished, but this will be ongoing for a short period of time. Finally after that, I decided to improve slightly with the Bionic Granny remix, by adding a touch of extra melodies. As soon as the piece of music was finished, I decided to work on the game code. As well as the school stage, I am hoping to add some other characters like, dogs, angry shoppers, drunks, ghetto blasters (blaring notes at you) and some other interesting things.

Unfortunately not much time was spent on the game code for this game, as it was time for tea. So I only programmed in the game screen, IRQ player, etc. But hopefully I should work on the actual game and have something in action some time soon.

As soon as the game is finished and has been tested. It will be released on my web site as a free download and I'll make an authentic tape loader based on the Mastertronic Visiload loader (blue screen and flashing multicolour border) but of course, with loading music.