Cruiser X-79 - Update #4

Saturday 29^th April 2017

Here comes yet more progress made with this great Commodore 64 game project. The game is starting to work out much better. The player / enemy bullet collision finally got implemented. I did have a few issues with the sprite/charset collision subroutine, so it was time to take a look at that. There were some missing values, so those got fixed in. This took some time and I felt quite frustrated with the sprite/background collision subroutine. I decided to take a look at the source code of X-Force to see where I actually went wrong. Sometimes it is always good to have backups of older game projects, when in doubt :)

After fixing those. I decided to work on a few additional background tiles, also swapped colour attributes. This is so that on later levels, all 3 colours of the background ($d021, $d022, $d023) can be different. The additional tiles build are power up tiles. The tiles got exported into the source code. The tiles made were a shield for player's invincibility – for a temporary moment of time, rocket tile – for increasing the player's laser speed and a bomb – for a press space bar smart bomb feature (not implemented into the source yet). I tried reading the player ship to background collision, it read fine for the shield and laser. Strangely enough however when I tried to call the collision test to the bomb tiles, the code seemed to have read the wrong part of the background, which caused a wrong area disappear. This will be looked at some time next week.

You may also remember last week I added a player death subroutine. There wasn't a lives indicator. So that got implemented today. The yellow diamond characters represent the number of lives (including zero) which the player has. After the player explodes, the yellow diamond becomes red. The player has 4 lives at the start of the game, and will eventually be able to get extra lives later on in the game – Not implemented yet. A Game Over jingle was produced for the game.

I also implemented a STAGE CLEAR message at the end of the level. Before the message appears on screen, I made it so that the player moves up.

Anyway, time to backup this project and show you yet another video preview. Yet some more bugs in the code, but this is still a WIP anyhow :)

Cruiser X-79 Update #3

22nd April 2017

It has been quite a while since I last blogged something in. This time I have no video to show you, but a few snapshots, to prove more work has been done on the project.

Anyway what has been happening this week. Well, today in fact. Some more game sprites were drawn, and another 2 alien formation tables were set up. Although no path movement tables have yet been set. This will happen occasionally. Some new space ships were created to make alien waves move downwards, and diagonal through a table. There's also another downwards formation, where circular robotic ships move in different speeds. They appear in more than just one go.

I also focused on scoring. A score subroutine was added and linked to the enemy death subroutines, so that the player scores points per alien shot.

Then came the sprite/background collision. I referred to the source in Trance Sector Ultimate, to try and get a 2x2 char sprite/background collision, and even implemented one on the 2x3 characters. I wanted to give this game a Uridium/Warhawk type of feeling, so made it possible that the player can destroy background objects to boost the score. The other sprite/background collision resembles to the player / wall collision.

After adding the collision subroutines, the player was missing something vitally important. A shield counter - to give the player chance to escape collision, when in re-spawn mode. Also an explosion animation to the player. So that every time the player hit an enemy, when the shields are out it explodes.

Now here's the latest WIP video of the work that has been done so far on this project.

Tune in next time for another project update :)

Cruiser X-79 Update #2

1st April 2017

Okay, just a quick update in the blog. Well, today was quite a hard going session. More work has been done in the game project, and seems to be going quite well. I programmed some additional 1-way alien formation patterns. Although I do intend to create path formations in the near future. Also added are some newer enemies, and also a parallax effect in some parts of the space station. I won't say any more, check out this video below :)