Cruiser X-79 - Popping the bubbles

 On this rather chilly week, I have been working on the fourth level of Cruiser-X 79. Level 2 started where the player entered an enemy base. Level 3 was a crystal space world. I wanted to do something slightly different and quite unusual for level 4. 

I wanted to make level 4's stage "Bubble World". I replaced all of the character sets that formed the stars and transformed them to form bubbles. Next I wanted to make some alterations to the enemy bases. The previous three levels had straight plain bases and seem to be too much the same thing. I wanted to try and make the bases look slightly different. So I edited the characters that formed the plain bases, and added shades of two multi-colours to them.

After carefully working on the shades, I felt that something should be done about the parked space ships background, which the player can shoot. Wouldn't it be nice if those alien ships in the background are changed to something more interesting. I replaced the chars that formed alien ship chars into robotic bugs. As a bonus the player can blast those. 

After editing the chars, I got myself busy and worked on constructing the game maps. I started off by clearing the whole map of the previous level. Then edited the tiles with the updated characters and built the bubble world. After I finished designing the bubble world, I imported everything into my game project. I also created additional Exomizer commands to level crunch the new graphics for level 4 and then I adjusted the level parameters in the game code. Then I compiled run the game in cheat mode.

I was playing through all of the four levels, but I realised that there were two things wrong in the game. The first was that the player and the bullet did not die after shooting the deadly tiles that formed the high light bricks. The second problem was that level 4 did not play the correct in game music. It played level 1's in game music. It turned out that I did compose level 4's music in Goat Tracker V2.75, but it didn't get exported to the game project. After fixing the music issue, I edited the game code to allow collision detection with the rogue char (242). Then I made the player die if it hit that particular character, or remove the player's bullet if that character is shot.

The overall result for level 4 looked great, but really could have looked better. I passed Saul the 4 levels I constructed along with the preview of the game in action. 4 levels done, 12 remain to be built - hopefully another 1 or 2 levels should be built next week.