Sunday 14 August 2011

Get ready for some real carnage

14th August 2011

Sundays are boring, I have to admit. Well, only one thing for it. MORE PROGRAMMING. Well, that's what's been happening today? I have been very busy on a project for Psytronik Software. Since Super Tau Zeta has been finished (Only awaiting Kenz or Ste's loading pic) I decided to work on another game. In fact a very long awaited title, which appeared in Games That Weren't. What game am I talking about? Well does Bloodwheels ring a bell? This game was written back in 1994 originally for Psytronik Software. Perhaps Alf was waiting for someone (before I got involved with SEUCK enhancements at the time) . Sadly it never got enhanced for a commercial release back in the day.


Yesterday, Kenz contacted me via Email asking me if I could implement the logo which he painted for this game on to the front end. Well, I gave it a go, but when I checked out the old title screen I originally did for it back in 2010, I felt that the front end was just too plain. So I decided to make a brand new front end for this game today, and feature some amazing animations and add some extra stuff to the game as well.

The first thing was preparing the files to import into the source code. Those of which were the SEUCK files, music, new charset (which I used from the Pour Le Merite SEUCK game - my charset of course) and also edited the charset to make some frames for the title screen animation. Once all preparing was done, I worked on the programming side of the project. First I programmed a few routines which will hack SEUCK to do amazing things and play music during play. Then I programmed routines that could animate the water (2 chars rolling downwards continuously) and also fixed the score routine, so in 2 player mode, the correct player gets the points per hostage rescued.

As soon as I was happy with all of the in game features, I programmed a new front end, which featured Kenz's cool Bloodwheels logo (from the loading picture) and also got the front end animating and playing music, flashing the "Press fire to start" text. I also added the ability for the players to press fire in either joystick port. Joystick port 2 allowed the player to start a game for 1 players only. Joystick port 1 allowed both players to participate in the action. I also added GET READY, GAME OVER and MISSION COMPLETE scenes. I was really happy with what was done so far.


To end the session, I decided to work on the tape master. I decided not to play around with the loading stripes this time round. An Ocean style loader would be perfect for this compilation, but I used the tape loader source by Martin Piper. Nice loader system, displaying a neat loading picture, based on Alf Yngve's original artwork.

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