Saturday, 29 April 2017

Cruiser X-79 - Update #4



Saturday 29th 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 :)


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