Let's get buzzin'

26th February 2014

NOT SEUCK THIS TIME :o)

After a few weeks back, I heard bad news about the game Honey Bee by Wayne and Prime, not getting finished. Due to a fatal computer crash. Work was destroyed, and all that remained was a playable demo with a few levels and no limit of lives. Anyway, to cut a long story short - This was almost a game which would never see the light of day after that major issue....  Until now :)

Honey Bee is under development once again, in co-op with Autumnsoft and The New Dimension. I have contacted Wayne and the other C64 people who were involved with the project and I am happy to be programming it. Of course major changes will have to be made. I discussed about this with Wayne, JSL, Wayne and Yogibear and a few others). We all agreed about making changes to the graphics, some of Wayne's sprites and graphics still can stay in the game. I made a load of major changes and created completely new graphics. The other people were happy with the result. I designed 4 stages in MSCK, and then captured the screens (for level packing in the near future). 

A couple or three weeks later, I started programming the game. Erm, hold on. Before I actually started doing the graphics, I did a bit of programming, in C64Studio which had Yogibear's tune playing, and also Wayne's bee moving in a way, similar to Prime's HoneyBee. When I did the new graphics, I created a char group, and noted down the range of chars which would have no effect, collect pollen or are considered to be deadly for the bee. Also sprite animation was put in place. Then after importing the new graphics into the game's source. I displayed the very first level (unpacked). 

I started programming of the main game engine last week on Thursday, during my day off work. Since the bee was moving already, and a test screen was in place. I started work on the sprite / char background collision. Unlike the previous version of Honey Bee, the killer chars were all over the place. See paragraph above regarding the new chars. The collision routine had to be read in 3 areas of the player's sprite. Top central, middle central and bottom central. I wanted to make the sprite/background collision to be much fair. I also added a routine that checks if all pollen chars have been removed from the current screen. If they have then a level complete tune plays. Otherwise nothing. I also added a routine which killed the bee if it touched any of the killer chars (background) which it cannot fly past (Rocks, trees, etc). The result looked quite good.

This week, I have been working on enemy movement for the game engine. I got a couple of enemies in place and they are moving up / down at this moment in time. I also worked on making checks on the behaviour for each enemy sprite. 4 sprites will be used for enemies that mover left / right, up / down (depending on the behaviour table) and 2 sprites are reserved for special hazards, e.g. poisonous bubbles, fireballs, etc.

There is still a lot of work to be done on this game, but all in all, it seems to be turning out quite well. Check this video out on what has been done so far.