Lots of things have been going on over the past couple of weeks or so. I have such little time to put a lot of info about what has been happening into this blog. Also I don't have a video this time round. Anyway, here's what has been happening behind the scenes this time round:
First of I wanted to make some slight improvements to the background graphics, although some glitches still existed inside the background graphics. This was because I was only doing rough ideas, not actually implementing the proper games graphics. I will be looking for a C64 buddy to do this.
As well as this, I have been putting in pointers in which should call the low/hi-byte values of the alien formation tables. This also involved manually creating, drawing and testing enemy sprites for each formation. The idea is to later on, on each level call different alien formation to the game. A couple weeks before I created the patterns for the alien formation. After testing all of the formation today. I was happy with most aliens, but there were a couple of formation patterns that might need to be altered in the future. One pattern was very buggy.
Finally the player now has fully working power ups. Every time it picks up a rocket tile, a power up gets rewarded to the player. The player cannot fire a new power up / default bullet until after the last bullet has moved offset.
So far I am very pleased with the result. It looks as if the main game framework could be finished soon. Just some debugging to the interrupts, bullet firing and of course replacing tacky alien formation movement with a better custom formation. Also of course there is the alien firing bug, which needs to be fixed, to avoid bullets firing where you cannot see the aliens.
The background snapshot below looks entirely messy, but I'm hoping that there will be someone available to help me work on the in game graphics and game sprites.
