Thursday, 18 October 2012

Enter the tiger

18th October 2012

Today's session on Amazon Tales took a while to work on - especially for the first level. But things are starting to shape up quite nicely. I worked on creating more enemy tables for varying the different types of enemies on screen. Although the result still doesn't look correct and the movements are too plain, I have a few tricks up my sleeve this coming Saturday. I also added a new enemy (which consists of sprites), which are the big tigers. :)

It took me a few hours to think about and work on the new extended tables for the sprite animations, start position, movement, etc but so far a not bad result. Check out our latest video showing the progress of the game so far :)




Thursday, 11 October 2012

Amazon Tales - Level proceedure

11th October 2012

Last week on Amazon Tales, I got the enemies moving via tables. Although the tables are incomplete, I shall be returning to those on Saturday. Today I programmed some routines in which can detect where the end of each level lies in the map. Alf Yngve's maps had a column of blank blocks. This, I'm assuming represents the end of each level. So I wanted to make it so that when the timer spots the black blocks - it will blank the screen (Later during the project, I'll be adding Get Ready and Well Done sprites to the screen) ... I programmed a loop in which can check for the game scrolling time before switching to the next level.

The Sacred Temple


Secondly, to enhance things a little, I worked on writing some music for Amazon Tales. I loaded up Goat Tracker, composed some new instruments and then worked on composing the tune for the title screen, get ready/well done and game over jingles. Followed by the in game music. I imported the tune into the source code of the game, and got the Get Ready/Well Done jingle to play after every screen blanking interval. Then when the game was ready to start, the music changes to the in game music. Seems to have worked a treat.

More work on this on Saturday.


Thursday, 4 October 2012

Here come the critters

October 4th 2012

Still working on Amazon Tales, and so far although it is the early stages. It feels quite promising. Today I worked on ways to animated the enemies and also change their animation per every object offset. I created a small table to test for EIGHT alterations of the enemy object per reset. Result turned out pretty good. After an enemy left the screen, it appeared as a different object. More work to be done this Saturday. Here's a video of the result so far :)


Monday, 1 October 2012

Enter the natives

30th September 2012

More productivity at work today, but before I go on my 12-8 shift, I decided to spend this morning (Since 8:45pm) working a bit more on the Amazon Tales project. The deadline is looming closer, but I still manage to spare some of my free time on C64 activities. So what's been happening today? First of all last week, I got the player on screen, move around and shoot. Now it's time to insert some enemies, in which the player will have to shoot at.

First of all, I wanted to test the game sprites to ensure that they all appear on the screen okay, without any movement. I built a test in which shows four natives a dart (which the natives will shoot, and also an aztec coin). Nothing on the enemy front is supposed to move anywhere on screen. Well, it worked out pretty well. Pretty much happy with this so far.

My next job was to get those enemies moving across the screen (or downwards). The plan for the coins will be for those to drop down on to the ground, prompting the player to pick them up. The coins purpose will be to give the player a better ability to shoot at the baddies or move faster - but that will be revealed later on in the blog. If a life gets lost, he loses all abilities. The bullet sprite will be indestructible. More on that later in the blog, when I get round to working on collision.

I got the enemy and bullet sprites moving in a straight line at the same speed - but that wasn't the end of it. I need to add speed table pointers. This is so that the enemies can move at various different speed values. So I added value X + Y tables, according to the speed and direction of the enemy's movement. I also put that into a loop as well. It worked out quite nicely.

Not much time for any more work on this, so I'll be doing more on this game project later on this week.

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