Gardens, sea, pyramids. Everything, Baaaaah!

11th February 2011

My main code for Sheepoid's finished (I think), apart from the ending (Which will be changed) as I felt that the ending for Sheepoid would not really be what people would have wanted. A better idea is planned for that, and I have plenty of time to get this project finished beforehand. Anyway, I decided to take a little break from programming today, and work on the main level schemes and graphics. So off the PC cross assembler, and straight on to my real Commodore 64 I go. ;o)

I loaded up the Multi Screen Construction Kit by Jon Wells and I loaded up my character set from the game project (Which I converted from my PC on to a C64 floppy disk). I created a few other character sets. The game uses a mix of hires and multicoloured graphics, so I created a few chars (from char $60+) to make those the scrolling voids. I also made some additional characters for the bottom and side panel, for where the player will be based. I didn't want to use the same panel as I did for the WIP version of the game. So I decided to draw some additional features, which were 1x1 chars to build flowers, trees, Egyptian, pyramids, water and hot desert (although it looks like custard :o).

After finishing the character sets, it was then time for me to create the objects, for putting on to 24 of the level screens. So I built the different scrolling voids (Alth

ough MSCK does not scroll those), and also different versions of the bottom and right panel which the player's always on. After this I found something to be not right. The panel on the right looks ugly without a curved character between the last 2 rows and columns. So I built a curved panel to put on to the background. It looked much nicer. After designing the 24 levels (Which in all, took me a couple of hours to do, as I was remixing some of the existing pane

ls and voids as well). Finally all 24 screens were built. I saved all the data on to the Sheepoid disk, built a final library (On the same disk). Then I ported everything back on to my PC (in the Sheepoid ACME project folder) using my XM1541 and CBMXfer application.

My next job will be to get all the level screens into the game source code. Then program some arcade/Jeff Minter style sound effects as the sounds I made using the Cult SFX editor wasn't really suitable for this type of g

ame, due to it's restrictions ;o).