Trance Sector Preview :)

29th April 2012
Well finally I have a playable preview of Trance Sector for the Commodore 64. Last Friday evening and Saturday morning, I updated several routines so that the player's background collision was more accurate. I didn't even need a char row/column table for the new sprite/background collision routine. Also got the player to be trapped in a prison for a short period of time. The prison turns into a normal tile after the player steps on it, which was intended. I also got the player to move along the magnetic conveyor belts. Finally I added (for the first time ever with my game projects) a keyboard option. This is so that if a player hasn't got a joystick to plug into port 2, they can use Q (Up), A (Down), O (Left), P (Right), Spacebar (Fire).

I sent a build of the preview to a few of my C64 fans/friends and they were pretty much impressed with the work that was done so far. Alas, I had bugs reported which were silly ones. One of which I forgot to restart the game on the very first level after the game was over, and also the playable demo crashed after completing it. Also the player moved automatically after being released by the prison tiles.

Today I worked on making some vast improvements and amendments to the game. First of all I fixed the major bugs/issues which were spotty last night. I also made some graphical updates to the game sprites. I could not resist programming a little objects display routine, so the gamers know what the objects are - before moving on to the front end. I also added a pause/unpause and quit game function. Then sent the final build (I hope it is the final build of the preview) of the game to my C64 friends/fans to test the preview. So far it seems to be working great. I am really looking forward to showing this preview at RetroVision 2012's retrogaming, beer drinking meeting. :)