1st April - 13th April 2021 (Continued)
Last time in my blog I mentioned about the Para Lander Mini, and also how I thought the game was finished. Things did not really go according to plan. In this next part, this is where I decided to stick to 64tass instead of using Turbo Macro Pro.
Last time
I prepared, designed and developed an enhanced edition of Para Lander DX on theC64 with aid of an Action Replay cartridge plugin, some C64 applications, including Turbo Macro Pro. I worked my socks off on the game project and finally came out with a working game. However things did not turn out how I expected. Although I had a fully working title screen, hi-score table and game. There were some elements missing in the game. So here is what happened.
A new intro - Nice
Friday last week I ended up with a new picture for a TND intro by Hugues. I worked on programming it, added a Future Composer soundtrack, and the result turned out great. I then packed and crunched the game with the Sledge Hammer II and Cruel Cruncher V2.5+ to continue with the old-school theme. Then I wrote the game documentation. Unfortunately however the game was still not ready to release. So it was back to the game code once more.
Random situation
The game was working out quite well, but the main problem was the game play. The zeppelins were moving slow across the screen but the game was just too easy to play. I decided to create a random table of speed and I set random speed timers and pointers to the zeppelins. Unfortunately however I was unable to continue using Turbo Macro Pro as once again, the bottom area of the screen messed up and this time it crashed. This de-motivated me more from using Turbo Macro Pro for this game. I must have used all the memory perhaps?
As a drastic measure I decided to from now with the project use the 64tass on my PC. I created the random tables, generated them and compiled the game (and crunched it with Exomizer) and run the game in VICE. It was working quite nicely. After I completed the first round, Zeppelins randomly changed their speed. I came across another issue. The zeppelins were going past too fast.
This resulted to only setting the speed of the zeppelin to the slowest speed, and play with the drag rates, between 0 and 3. After compiling and sharing the build with Hugues and another tester. They felt that the game would be better off using levels. So ...
Rank up
I felt there was something missing in the hi-score display. The title and game have music, but the hi-score display re-uses the title music. I felt that there should be at least one more tune for the game. For this, I decided to browse through the HVSC under my name, and I found a tune I feel that would have been great for the high score table. Feel Great. As a bonus this tune was also composed in DMC V4.0. I relocated the music to $8000, and placed it into the game project c64 folder and re-built the source. It worked. Excellent.
Level up
Random zeppelins in the game code didn't really work out, so it was time to make levels. Actually that was pretty much simple. I deleted all of the random tables and I entered the drag speed value for each level. The table for each zeppelin's drag rate was 16 bytes. The drag rate was still set between 0-3. Although setting the drag rate of 3 to 2 sort of looks as if the zeppelins are moving at the same speed, but in fact the speed is actually set to faster. After setting up the last level the game should loop. I then re-linked the game to the TND intro and prepared for a release candidate on my Ultimate 64. Yet again I used the native C64 tools to pack and crunch the game, like it would have been back in the 1990's. I then sent the game to testers. Some bad news - there were still bugs.
I decided at the end that I'll just stick to using 64TASS and
Exomizer for all the packing and linking of this project, but I can disguise it to look like some of the old memorable packers . This saves me having to mess
about all the time using old packers and crunchers just for the sake of
old-school - then finding out something else gone wrong with this project.
The bugs in the game were that the hi score name entry routine allowed unwanted characters, which made a mess in the name entry. This was supposed to allow alpha-numeric characters, delete, space bar and return keys only It turned out I had set an incorrect range value (perhaps a typo) that read from number 0 and all the PETSCII character code before shift+A. Pah!
The second bug was that the total number of levels = 15 instead of 16 before looping back to 01. I set an incorrect value in the level compare code. It should have read 17 as the max value instead of 16, otherwise it would have been 15 levels. I re-compiled the source and fed the project through Exomizer, and after a few seconds, the game was working. The game has now been sent to the testers. Hopefully this could be a better result. We'll have to wait and see.
Update: Still not ready yet, but nearly there. Fingers crossed ;)
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