Cruising for a Bruising

20th January 2019 

Well, 2018 sure has been a bit of a roller coaster of a ride, where C64 productivity and time was concerned. I mainly have been busy on SEUCK projects, but finally I have got time to do what I want. I will be on an Assemble It tutorial game project later on this week, but today I decided to concentrate a bit more on Cruiser-X 79. 

So then, what has been done today?. Before launching the playable preview, I have been doing a little more design to the test game map, which Saul originally did. This was mainly because the map looked pretty much plain space after about a quarter of the game map was drawn. So I decided to add some more tiles into the game's map and I tried to make it look as cool as I could. As soon as I finished with the map, it was time for me to export it to the game project.

Next was to load up the CBM PRG Studio and tweak some of the game code. There were some bugs inside the game, where sprites could be visible in the black lines between the game screen and the score panel. I simply fixed this issue by moving a subroutine which masked blank sprites into that particular screen area. After re-compiling the game, I could see my trick was working.

The next trick to was deal with the main game engine. I found that while playing this game, the player ship was just moving way too fast. The player was able to crash into the aliens or the deadly background too quickly. So I reduced the X, and Y speed of the player, so that it was moving at the slowest X speed and the Y speed is near enough to the correct X speed of the player.

Following that, I wanted to tweak the power ups slightly. There are 3 different tiles, marked B, M and S. The B tile is the smart bomb, M is the missile upgrade, and S is the shield. I wanted to make some alterations to the smart bomb and the missile. I started with the missile. The player's missile did work, but shouldn't the player have to pay the penalty for a cost of a life?. I altered the life lost code, so that then the player's missile was set to default - every time the player dies and fires the next bullet when spawned again.

The Smart Bomb feature was the next for me to enhance. Last time (originally) the smart bomb had a bug in the code, in which while a batch of aliens were being destroyed. Half a batch visible may have destroyed, but other alien sprites of the same group appeared. This just didn't look good for me. So I decided to do something about it. I added a trick which was to explode all of the aliens in one go. This was done simply by setting the code to enable all aliens, and make them dead straight away.

While still working on the Smart Bomb feature. I felt that the smart bomb code should be changed. So I altered the feature by adding some flashing background, to indicate the explosion. Also the feature was better off not being automatic, but manual. So I added a new subroutine and pointer where the player checks for the bomb carried. If carried, the Space Bar key activates the smart bomb feature, which destroys all or spawning aliens and awards the player 500 points.

The player has a penalty feature. If the smart bomb is carried, and the player loses a life, it loses the smart bomb power up, as well as the bullet power up.

I was going to launch a playable preview of this game on to the TND web site today, but I have decided to postpone it, due to a weird collision bug that is in place in the main game's code. The sprite/sprite collision code needs to be re-written from scratch, and some of the code needs to be inside macros. Once this has been dealt with, a playable demo of the game will be launched on to TND. Watch this space.