It's getting there ... :)

5th November 2011

Things are getting on pretty well with Woolly Jumper and I feel that I could be nearly finished with the 16KB CRT version of this fun game project. Well, estimated time for finishing the 16KB cartridge is probably between next week and 20th November 2011. I am dedicating myself to at least one hour to this project during my spare time all this week, as we are coming closer and closer to the deadline.

So then what has been happening today? Well, basically I have been concentrating on some minor bug fixing and also getting the enemies to roam across the screen with their new attack patterns. So how did I go around to working on those? It started with some experiments with sprites. Before I could build the sinus patterns, I had to work out the starting and ending position for where to put the enemy sinuses. To be able to do this, I did a little poke that would display a square sprite. Did a little maths to work out the: start and stop position of the sprite sinues for the top, middle, and bottom portions of the screen. These mainly took effect on the penguin ships, green alien saucers and chickens. The meanest enemy of them all were the pink bugs. The bugs have a different kind of behaviour compared to the three aliens (penguin, green saucer and space chickens) . The bugs shall also be appearing less frequently, compared to the other aliens.

After programming and storing the new sinus movements for each enemy, I restored the sprite/sprite collision and discovered a silly bug. For every second enemy shot, you could see an explosion appear again after the death animation had finished. That was one heck of a daft mistake I discovered today. To to fix that problem, I added a routine that switched off the enemy dead mode, so that the enemy is offset. I also made it so that the enemies don't appear on the screen, or move in a Y-axis if they are supposed to be offset - and it worked.

The last thing I did today was added a little ending to the game, for after the final level was complete. It was something too basic, but because of size restrictions, I was unable to do a very good ending - but the full game will of course have a better ending than what I did for this version.

The hobby project continues through to December after the .CRT version's finished!