Saturday 28 May 2022

Cruiser-X 79: Let's Rock !!!

Wow, am I really on to level 9 already? You betcha :). After completing level 8 last week. I worked on with designing level 9 on Thursday. I thought that for level 9, it would be nice to add a some new theme to the game. So an idea had come into my mind. The first half of the levels have been quite simple and involved shooting aliens and flying through bases, and hoping to avoid the enemy bases highest points.

Well, level 9's idea is similar to the first few levels, but I came up with an idea to implement even more deadly background. So that the player can easily crash into deadly terrain like rocks or similar - unless the player is carrying a protective shield (simply by hovering over the 'S' tiles). I started the level where there power ups are in place at the start of the game. Then I designed some of the background to make it look a bit like rocky terrain. It sort of uses some of the base's background character sets, and the deadly high building. I painted the blocks a little to make the deadly terrain look a bit like rocks. 

Although the graphics data that was being used for level 9 was based on level 4's Bubble World. This time round, I didn't want the bases to be bubbles based. I also didn't want the space background to become bubbles either. Instead, I chose to edit those character sets and turn those into steel saw disks. The colour scheme for the level are red, grey and light grey. The shoot-able blocks and other bits got transformed into different charset objects. After finishing the map and the design layout of level 9. I packed up everything ready for the next day.

The next day came, but sadly nothing happened that Friday. I was going to do some more work on the project on Friday, which was to work on some game music for the project. Sadly I felt unwell to be productive. Maybe tomorrow.

Saturday came by, I loaded up GoatTracker Ultra V1.2.0 to first work on some more in game music for Alf Yngve's Captain Ishtar project. Then I worked on level 9's music. It is sort of a dark, moody and industrial tune, which I felt would suit Level 9 of Cruiser-X 79. The tune is not trance this time (unlike levels 5, 7 and 8). I edited my instruments to make it sound right, then I exported the tune as SID and tested the tune. 

Once I was happy with the music, I exported it to PRG format into the game project's source code. Then I loaded up Charpad, and exported my Level 9 graphics and crunched them with Exomizer. I loaded up the source code, edited the settings and then compiled and built the project and tested the game in cheat mode. It looks pretty good. However, after Saul's magic touch to the graphics, it will look even better.

I am now going to take a short break on the level development of Cruiser-X 79. It is set to continue in about 2-3 week's time, unless theC64 challenge for Retro Programmers Inside's PONG challenge is finished and submitted to the compo. Stay tuned!!

To find out more about my progress with theC64 challenge #7 PONG 50th Anniversary game, please check out the link below:


https://tnd64.blogspot.com/2022/05/thec64-challenge-7-celebrating-50th.html



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