Cruiser-X 79 vs Spore

 Well then, another week nearly over, and the rough graphics designs and maps I have been making are close to completion. Today I focused the mid morning - afternoon developing level 13 for Cruiser-X 79. The idea this time is based inside another base, which contains spore. The spore will not be deadly for the player ship, but there are to be quite a lot of obstacles for the player to watch out for, such as the usual high walls.

There isn't really much I can talk about, where it comes to this level. Except for that things look a bit messy at the moment. However S.C should hopefully be able to tidy things up with my rough level map design.

More music has been done for this game, and yet again another up tempo soundtrack, but this time more moody, but still trance like. 

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

Cruiser-X 79 - Shackled with Chains

 So far 6 levels were created and developed during this project. Now it was time for me to work on level 7 - Branded with Chains. Before watching some TV, I started on working on level 7 of Cruiser-X 79. Since the previous two levels were mainly based inside enemy bases/worlds. I decided to set this level back into space. Also I wanted to add some cool effect to the level as well.

The first thing I did for level 7. I loaded up level 2's data. Then I completely cleared the map (and saved it as level 7, just in case I saved the file incorrectly as level 2). I then set the colour scheme and set up the stars and planets (Which after Saul's update, I hope to be spiral galaxies). The project got saved again and it was time to watch some TV. 

The next day I loaded up the project, and I worked on making level 7's graphics. While doing this, I was listening to some music on Deepsid throughout. I designed the base layout, and constructed some large and also small chains. The large chains have been set to be static, and the small chains have been set at the scrolling chars. This is to give a good visual, when the lower chains are inside a shaft or between the two large chains. I also added a bit of branding to the game as well. That's right 'TND' has been embedded on some of the bases. I saved all the work.

Next I loaded up Goat Tracker and I worked on the in game music. Although the game consists of chains and things like that. I wanted to so something like a moderate speed up-tempo soundtrack to suit the game's level. After listening to tunes from Fairlight demos during developing the graphics. I thought that type of style of music might be ideal for the game. I worked on the sound tracks for a couple of hours or so, and came out with a masterpiece. I saved the piece of music.

I went back to Charpad to export the map, charset and tiles data to my C64 Studio project. Then I loaded up C64 Studio and edited the level colour table to match my Charpad file. Then built the batch file, so that level 7's music and graphics data gets compressed. Then test run the level. It looked great. Everything unpacked fine and at the correct colour. The music blended in well with the game, but I think I made the tune too long. It didn't finish when near to the end of the level. I think the intro of the tune could be tool long, so I might just remove the intro when I come back to the music perhaps next week. Still, I am pretty pleased with the result of Level 7.

Cruiser-X 79 - April Update #1

14th April 2021  

Previous update was deleted along with the Para Lander DX blog entry. This entry from 3rd April  is what has been remembered from that day.

3rd April 2021

Last time I was dealing with alien patterns. The next task was to put these into levels. I also was setting up the colour settings for each level table. Of course, last time all aliens were put into order of sequence and were being tested.

That week (for this part in the development) I mainly focused on the level alien attack patterns. Instead of all aliens being in sequence 0-40. I setup alien selection tables for each level. The idea was to ensure that each table has a specific level of difficulty. There are 40 different alien tables (some of which are duplicated enemies doing different things). The idea is that the harder faster enemies get used after a few levels. There are 16 levels in total.

Now that all the alien patterns are in place for each level. There is not really much I can do to the game right now. Although I will need to work on doing different tunes for each level of the game. 16 different tunes might be too many to compose, so maybe I do a few tunes and then create a table to load specific music files. Still, that will do for now :)

 

 

Cruiser-X 79 Update

1st May - 26th May 2016

While things have looked very quiet on this project. It doesn't mean that we are not continuing with the game project. In fact, the hardest part of the game code is practically out of the way. There are 16 alien formation tables set up so far, but there's still more to go. For the time being I have decided to leave the additional alien group property tables for the time being and focus on trying to get the main game engine repaired.

The aliens were unable to shoot at the time, and I tried to re-install the alien firing. However because I had deleted a lot of the old code (as I assumed it wasn't necessary) C64Studio processed loads of errors. I looked through the code, and tried to work a way round fixing the error result. Good news is that I managed to find the result. I re-created the enemy firing routine, selected the aliens to fire at random (via a pointer and value selector). If the alien was alive, the pointer and the bullet was out of the screen.

After fixing the alien firing I decided to fiddle about with the front end a little more. I added a flashing effect to the game's title screen. Also a page flip routine was added in order to flip between the front end credits and also the high score table. The result turned out pretty good.

Next the main game. The aliens were originally spawning in sequence. However, I didn't want the alien groups to spawn in order of the values 1 -17, so I setup the level pointers and some custom sequence tables to get the aliens spawning in a chosen value for that particular level. The video below shows you how the feature results during game play.

Update 11/09/2020: I just want to let you know that this game has NOT been cancelled. At the moment, I am stuck in a loop where on the coding side, I cannot really continue until the new set of level graphics come in. This project is therefore currently frozen until further notice.

Aliens Unleashed

23rd March 2020

Last Saturday, I mentioned about the problems I had with the alien movement patterns, where I made things a lot harder for myself. Especially the previous weekend. This weekend, I started on working on the alien movement groups. After Saturday's major change of the code and pointers. After following the Starfysh code, I finally got somewhere and I am now ready to continue with working on the alien movement groups.

Alien movement is based on time instead of position. Once the timer table has reached the end, the next group of aliens can spawn. I have a lot more groups of aliens to work on, which will take some time time to make. Or should I say, a lot of time to make. Especially when the total number of enemy sprites drawn result to 26. I have used the border cycle on screen as a clock, so I can count which byte the table is read at, and also where I should time out the aliens to stop them wrapping across the screen.

On the plus side, since the game preview was released Summer last year. The majority of the game code is still there. Although at the moment I have disabled the collision, in order to test the aliens for their movement.

The new set of tables are as follows:

enemy1framelo !byte <Frame_AlienType2 ;Store low-byte of alien frame
enemy1framehi !byte >Frame_AlienType2 ;Store hi-byte of alien frame 
enemy1colour  !byte $0a               ;Store colour of alien
enemy1startx  !byte $0c               ;Start X-Position   
enemy1starty  !byte $f0               ;Start Y-Position
enemy1score   !byte $01               ;Amount of points to score
enemy1lives   !byte $01               ;Number or hits to kill alien
enemy1time    !byte $18,$18,$18,$1c,$18,$18,$18,$18 ;Timed movement
enemy1speedx  !byte $00,$00,$00,$00,$00,$00,$00,$00 ;Speed of movement accordingly X
enemy1speedy  !byte $fe,$fe,$fe,$fe,$00,$00,$00,$00 ;"                             Y

Where have all the aliens gone?

14th March 2020

Great news. Cruiser-X 79 continues this month. Today has been quite a long session. You might probably notice that the game was delayed for a very long time over several months period. This was mainly because of some other game projects I was working on. Happy Blocks DX, Amazon Tales, Mega Tank Blasta, Toxic (2020 Edition). Amazon Tales was made as a practice piece in order to attempt to develop custom enemy movement patterns which didn't require wasting $200 bytes of data. Plus I wanted to add a mixed batch of enemies in to the game project.

Since the game engine in Amazon Tales was successful. I have decided to try a similar attempt for Cruiser-X 79. In order to do that. I have to start the enemies attack patterns from scratch. Before I could do that, I had to delete the existing alien attack patterns. Therefore on today's build of the project, I concentrated on setting up table values per enemy type.

For example:

Alien1SpawnX = The starting horizontal position for the alien to spawn from
Alien1SpawnY = The vertical horizontal position for the alien to spawn from
Alien1Dir = Direction for the alien to move whilst in operation. 0 = Up, 1=Down, 2=Left,3=Right. This consists of a table of 8 bytes (Since the aliens are supposed to switch to the next direction every time a path limit has been reached).
Alien1Speed = Speed of the alien which is moving, once again 8 bytes.
Alien1ChangePosition = Horizontal or Vertical position in which the alien must reach before it can change to the next direction (or leave the screen)
Alien1ObjectLo = Low byte of the animation frame read from the sprite animation subroutine
Alien1ObjectHi = Hi byte of the animation frame read from the sprite animation subroutine
Alien1Colour = Alien sprite colour
Alien1Lives = Amount of lives the alien has before it can be destroyed
Alien1Score =  Multiple number of points to be scored per alien destroyed

I also made different lo/hi byte tables which should somewhere in the game code (once implemented) copy the self-modifying pointers in to the correct self-modifying code. For example, after the last change position has been breached, and all aliens are off set. A new group should spawn.

For now, there's no aliens in this current build, because the code needs to be started from scratch. This will be continued during my next coding session on this game project.

Blast those aliens

22nd October 2015

After yesterday's infestation of aliens. I have been working on more of Vortex Crystals this morning, and later in the afternoon. Well, I am still on my holiday leave until this weekend - so what should you expect? ... Yesterday, I worked on positioning the aliens and getting them to move around. Today is a completely different task.

Since the game allowed the player to shoot bullets, let the aliens walk about and the player move around the game area. I thought I was done with this stage. Not yet ... I received an email from Alf Yngve, indicating that the last WIP preview I showed him had a major restriction with the player's jumping on the very top platform. So I decided to alter the interrupts routine and open the top and bottom borders - but NOT allow any sprites to display at the very bottom or the very top of the border. The trick worked.

Now came the fun part of the game's framework. We have already had the running and jumping phase, so now it is the 'shooting' phase. The player can shoot already, but there was no specific collision set where a bullet hits an alien. A few routines were programmed so that according to each alien, a collision detection routine gets called. The first test was to allow the player to fire the bullet and detect the collision. Simply by flashing the border (inc $d020). After I tested the bullet on each alien, it was time to make an alien explosion.

To make the alien explosion, I could choose two different methods. The longest method is to create a morph alien sprite to explosion animation for each alien sprite. Or the alternative method is to stop the bullet sprite from moving, offset the alien sprite and then morph it into an explosion. I took the second option, as it saved me time - and since there's under 3 months to get the compo entry finished, it probably is a brave move.

After testing the alien explosion routine, to see how well it works. I was very happy with the result, and decided to add lives to each alien. This will give the aliens a certain number of hits from the player's bullet, before they explode. After generating the code, and having a little play around with the source to get things right. The program worked a treat - but there is still one more thing before I close down the project for the day.

The next was to get the aliens to re-spawn after a period of time. This should occur after a few seconds the alien last died. When the timer had reached its position per alien, the alien sprite re-appeared on the platform and it was able to move its usual movement afterwards.

My final task before I closed the project down for the day (and backup my work) was to add a score to the player. I made it that only 100 points are scored for draining an amount of lives for the aliens, and 500 points for destroying one. I am pretty pleased with the result of the game's framework so far, and look forward to finishing it in the near future as well :)

The next task will be to add power ups, which might be some time this weekend.