A hot sunny week, plenty of walks, except for today due to excessive heat. What better to do but relax and work on a new level for Cruiser-X 79. That is exactly what has happened on Thursday and Friday this week. I wanted to come up with a new idea for level 10 onwards for Cruiser-X 79. It is quite a deadly plot of mine. You'll see as you read on a little bit more. :)
I load up Charpad V2 and then load up level 1's graphics data. Then I save it as level 10. I saved it as Level_10-JaggedBase.ctm, which later gets renamed by myself as Level_10-BlockyBase.ctm. You will see the reason why I did this later on in this entry. The next paragraph in fact. As usual I filled the whole screen with the space background data. I then set the colour settings to a crystal blue, purple and light grey. It looks pretty nice.
The next step was to construct and design the base for level 10. I went down further to level 1's tiles and edited the base which had the jagged edges (Which were used for Level 3). The characters that form the jagged edges were transformed into nice brick like mosaics. This looks perfect for the edges. The scrolling void inside the enemy base is filled with black and blue waves. It looks really nice. Now what about the new feature in the game? Basically it is a deadly new feature, which requires skill. Some bases on level 10 (which will also feature on the remaining five levels to be done) feature a long wall across the whole base. The only way to get over that structure is by collecting a temporary shield and fly over them as quickly as you possibly can. The alternative solution will be to lose a life. There is a helpful clue in level 10 however. A skull with an up arrow warning there is danger ahead. - This will feature on another one or two levels, but the last set of levels it will not be used. It will be a test of memory.
After completing my map and scanning through the whole base inside level 10 I was very pleased with how the level looks and how it has turned out. I think with the extra touch Saul makes to the level, it will look even more marvellous. I must confess that there isn't much to be done for the charsets of level 10. They look good as they are already :)
Next I load up Goat Tracker Ultra V1.2.0 to compose some music for level 10. I decided to make this tune very upbeat and quite enjoyable. Although it is my typical style, I think it would fit very well in a space shoot 'em up. After composing the music, I tested everything on SIDPlay and then exported the music file to the binary folder in the project.
Finally I went back to Charpad and exported level 10's charset, tiles and map data into the game project. The source code gets edited to set the correct table value for the colour of the map. Also I altered the level counter routines so that the status panel can display the correct panel for each level loaded, according to the level pointer. I compile everything and test the level, and here's the result.
This is my very last WIP video for the main game as I honestly do not wish to give too much away.
I will be taking a look at the memory available inside the main game code, and see if it is possible to add a fast disk loader system into the game project, where no data gets overwritten by Exomizer's level memory packed data or other code. The disk loader I aim to use is Lasse's Covertbitops Fast Loader system, which I used for my brand new Reset Mix I Disk Menu, reserved for issue #15 of Reset. I tested the fast loader to see what would happen if I tried to load a program in VICE without true drive emulation. The loader worked nicely without fail.
Stay tuned next week.
