A room infested with aliens

21st October 2015

There's been a whole lot of work being put into my C64 16KB Game Cartridge compo entry. ... and that is just only the beginning, and progress is looking pretty good.... or is it? ...

Alf Yngve has got back to me with a couple of test levels he which built using SEUCK's background editor. A slight alteration was needed to the ladders, as the shadows underneath the ladders were too big. I only wanted 1 row of the bottom ladder to be shadowed - but on a temporary basis. This is because the shadow will be replaced with a duplicate ladder char, later on. I want levels put in place first :)

After the ladders got fixed. It was time for me to re-capture the screen and colour data using a M/C monitor in VICE. Then save each screen separately, and compress both screens with the Exomizer. I imported the new level data into the source code, and tested both screens. They work quite nicely. The player's behavior was a whole lot better. This is definitely turning into a decent platform game already :) ... Fantastic!!!

After several attempts at playing around with the platform game framework, I built. My next task was to get the alien robots, and walkers on to the screen. So a new set of pointers were required. Basically I'm asking the program, which direction should each alien move, has it reached its limit to where it should change direction? Is the alien dead? What animation should the alien be. I also set pointers to setup the starting position of aliens, for the start of the level. I set up the alien speed, so that for the first level, aliens can only move left/right, up/down at the slowest speed. Although there are 5 aliens on screen. This was only done to test the alien movement. The game shouldn't have too many aliens. After putting aliens in place. I re-enabled the player's Sprite/Sprite collision pointers, where aliens can kill the player if it touches them.

The next task later on this week, will be 'shooting', 'destroying' and re-spawning the aliens after the death sequence for them is complete.