2000 Kung Fu Maniacs - Final Touches

3rd + 4th September 2011

Flippin' heck. I have been too active haven't I - an I'm still enjoying it. Anyway during this weekend, I have been concentrating on doing some more stuff for 2000 Kung Fu Maniacs. Actually I think it is all done now.

The first thing I thought about was the player's status bar. Now being that 2000 KFM will be for one player only. I decided to do a little something useful to the status bar which is inside the border. So then what did I do? I moved it to the centre of the screen, simply by adjusting the X/Y attributes of the sprites that formed the status panel. Great!

The next thing I did was programming the new front end for the game. Due to restricted memory I had come up with a simple idea, which would display a bitmap logo, and some animated game sprites. I decided to have the whole screen in red, apart from the raster which holds the logo in place. I painted it in black. I also added the colour washing routine, using brown, red, orange, light red yellow and white. It looked pretty nice on the front end. I also added page flipping and timers. So that the title screen will flip from the credits to the high score table. This worked quite nicely. I also wrote a scroll text and programmed a smooth scroll which would display that text. Then I added the animated ninja sprites and the player's sprite.

As soon as I was happy with the front end I decided to work on the Get Ready and Game Over sequences. For this, I made a grey screen, and did the player chasing after the ninja, for the get ready sequence. Then I did an animation, similar to the Get Ready sequence, but instead of the ninja running off the screen. I got the ninja to punch the player into the air, and go splat on the ground. I thought that for this kind of scene it was quite funny to watch. :)

The next task was to program in the usual high score / name entry routines, as before. Like with 1000 Kung Fu Maniacs, I was hoping to add the rankings to the name entry message. Sadly I was unable to do that this time due to being completely out of memory for any more code. So I had to cut the high score routine smaller by missing that out. Otherwise some of the crucial data would have been overwritten by the high score routine.

As soon as the high score routine was finished. I tested everything to see if it all worked okay. It seems to be working fine. Now the final touches. The Galway Ninja loading music and the tape mastering. - Complete! Hopefully this is another SEUDS 2 game finished and ready.

Prepare for more awesome!

23rd August 2011

Heeyaaaaah! (Smack!). Another new project. Well, it's not really that new as I had it earlier on this year. Yes, it's 2000 Kung Fu Maniacs - Way of the Exploding Fish. Yet another game for the Shoot Em Up Destruction Set. I was originally having a laugh working on 1000 Kung Fu Maniacs, but 2000 KFM promises to be more silly and hilarious compared to the first one.

Today was my day off work, so I decided to work a little on this game. Well, actually the majority part of the in game enhancements was done to be honest. First of all I explored the sprites and discovered some sprites which were not used. I also replaced a sprite of the Van Damne type of character with a 2 - way Poodle boss - which requires 5 hits before it's defeated. The idea was to have the big dog guard

ing the tinned fish while the master of awesome was at the Moose Mart. I also copied some of the power up sprites and mirrored those so that the player will be able to have power ups when it comes to the enhancements.

The next task was to do the enhancements of the SEUCK game. Just like with Super Tau Zeta, the player gets a new weapon/surprise. This will only happen if the player picks up a scroll. I programmed a small routine that cycles through the 7 power ups in which the player could have. If the player picks up a scroll, the power up gets randomly picked. So either the player could have something useful, or probably useless, or even something very daft. I will not let you know what the actual power ups are. You will have to wait until the full game's finished and released on SEUDS 2 :).

Power ups have been sorted out now. So next was to add the linked explosions for whenever the boss gets hit. Well, I had one slight snag with the boss death. If the boss died, other enemies would explode as well. I then came up with a solution to that problem. The bosses could carry a smart bomb with them, so the enemies will explode if the boss has been defeated. This can be a reward. Of course that will not happen to the little dog boss, guarding the tin of Exploding Fish.

There's a stage that features a gallery. I've added some interesting twists to exhibits in the gallery. Some are good, but some are bad. Again the player should pick up the scrolls. Inside the gallery are two other collectables, but I have added two surprises there. One item triggers a smart bomb, while another triggers a punishment, where the player loses 1000 points due to collecting the object. There is also another twist involved as well. You will have to wait and see :)

The enhancements seem to be shaping up quite nicely. I shall send Alf the work that has been done so far to this game - and see if he can give me tips on bullet speed and duration for the power ups. :)