Let's Move to the Music

31st March 2012
This week I had even less spare time to do any C64 programming activities - because I have been working longer day (10am-8pm) shifts. Anyway, the good news is that today I have been doing a lot more on Trance Sector. I suppose on Tuesday, I did some work on starting the programming phase, in which was to display the game screen and also the sprites. Today I got to do more.

It was time to move those sprites. So I programmed some routines and subroutines to get the rockets moving up/down, left/right - depending on where they are situated on the game screen. I found that their speed was a bit too fast, so I altered the speed to the slowest speed for all 4 rockets.

Now that I am happy with the enemy movement. I decided to work on the player's movement. Unlike many of my TND game productions, where I use a routine which will move the sprite during every tap of the joystick. I wanted to make a more accurate movement pattern for this game. Mainly because I wanted the player to be able to cover every 2x2 block on screen. So I generated a timer to make the player move a reasonable amount of pixels and stop accurately on to the next 2x2 block.

Once I was happy with the player's movement. The next thing I did was worked on the animation for the rockets. I used 4 frames like I usually do, because I'm not too sure how much memory would be used in the whole game overall. The sprites are not really final either. So it doesn't really worry me much.

After I done the animation, I booted up GoatTracker and did some music for the game. It is surprisingly is a C64 techno/trance style tune I written specially for this game. After I finished doing the first tune, I imported it into the game's source code and got everything working. I even added a status panel to the test screen.

In a couple of days time / or maybe a bit longer. I will be working on the AI (Artificial intelligence) for each rocket, so that if the player gets detected on sight - the rocket swoops across the screen, trying to destroy the player. Then I'll be working on the game collision/logic. Other things to do are animate the background. Such as the void background and traps, etc. Then get the scoring/lives working.