Reach the top score

13th + 14th July 2012


Now that the main game engine, has been finished. I have been busy working on enhancing the front end last week. This week I have been working on the high score name entry routine. First the player's score had to be checked after game was over. Then I had to compare values to the final score. If the score was higher than any of the top 10 scores. The player could enter their name for the high score table. If however no high score has been detected the routine jumped straight to the front end. The easiest part was programming and testing the name entry routine. Obviously most games tend to use a simple joystick option in which up/down increments / decrements a character. Pressing fire takes the player to the next column, unless a certain character has been detected. I did exactly that for this game as well if an arrow pointing left was detected, it would rub a character from the name entry. If an up arrow was detected, I used it to represent 'finished' name entry.

The hardest part was to get 10 high scores checked, and moving the names to the CORRECT ranks. I used probably one of the most easiest, but longest approaches of them all, which was repeating each routine checking the player's score per high score. Then jump to a subroutine to allow the player to enter his/her name for the high score table. I found a green high score name entry to be pretty boring, so I jazzed things up and flashed the character sets of the well done message (and the character being used to enter the player's name). Then moved the names and scores down a row so that the player's name and score is in the correct position.

The front end required a lot of tweaking, so I fixed the sprites that were covering the last row of characters of upward scroll, so that the upwards scroll masked correctly. I also worked on a new help screen. Captured the screen in MSCK then I imported it directly into the project source code, and did a little more programming. So that the front end will flip to the next page and then after a short period of time, it switches back to the main page again.

The front end's virtually finished now. I think an end sequence will be the next on my list - then redesign all of the game levels.