RUN - RUN - THE INVASION HAS STARTED

28th October 2016

It is currently my second, but last day of my holiday, and things will start to quieten down even more from next week, due to even less free time. Although C64 activities will occasionally continue. Now today, you had better run (To the TND web site) as the invasion has just started.

Yes, indeed. The New Dimension finally launches 'Let's Invade'. A souped up Space Invaders style game with a major twist of audio and psychedelic visual. If you would like to check the full game out, in VICE, CCS64, Micro64 or your own C64 with 1541Ultimate, SDIEC or whatever. The game is best played on a CRT monitor, rather than an LED TV. Although I use an LED TV to save space, and no longer use a CRT. I set my C64 to a HDMI S-Video to HDMI convertor, and set my 19" TV to PC mode. That's where the best picture comes from my TV SET.

In this game, you have been transported into a vortex, where you will encounter some of the meanest invaders. In order to save planet Earth, you have to battle over 40 different waves of alien invasion. Luckily for you, you can pick up power ups, simply by blasting the orange aliens. However, power ups are timed, unless you have picked up a speed / firepower speed power up. Those of which only get lost if a mischievous invader gives you DEFAULT or you lose a life, by hitting their bomb, or an Invade occurs.

The game consists of psychedelic void scrolling visual effects, with strobe flashing and optional thumping in game trance SID music. The strobe effects also be disabled on the red startup screen. There's also assorted level setup, where more aliens will require more than 1 hit to be destroyed. The game is based on shaded colour, where the dark coloured aliens are weaker, compared to their counterparts. The brightest aliens will require even more hits before they can be eliminated. Alien behaviour is also different. The more aliens shot, the aliens will move a different way. Making this game slightly more original.

Full documentation on the game has also been included in the zip archive.

Should you wish to save the world from alien invasion, then why not DOWNLOAD "Let's Invade" for absolutely nothing, and then install it on your Commodore 64, VICE or whatever.

Let's Invade at The New Dimension


The game is produced on disk and tape.

Sadly there is no 16KB cartridge version of the game, due to the size of the overall production exceeding it.

Let The Invasion Commence [Part 10]

1st October - 8th October

The week was really quiet on the Let's Invade, project. Apart from the weekend, where a lot of activity has been made in this game. I was pondering for some handy information on generating random bullet firing for the aliens. Well, it turned out very bad last week, where I really got stuck. This week however was a completely different kettle of fish ... for better it was too :)

I was thinking in my head that the way I did the alien bullet random position subroutine shouldn't be based on wrapping in memory the low and hi-bytes of the alien colour, position, and sprite X position. Instead, it would have been better to generate a 256 byte table of values ranging from 1 to 25. So I generated a simple BASIC listing, to place a series of random tables in memory $1000-$1100. Then saved the table and then I extracted the random generated table file to the KickAssembler project folder. Next I created a command to open C64 the file (RandTable.PRG) for assembling.

The file imported into the source okay, however I needed to generate some more code, to set a looping value of 1 to 25. So a couple of subroutines were called in. One for moving to the NEXT value read from the random pointers (RandTable.PRG). Then store to the value of the actual pointer. Then a subroutine that calls the fetch table and check for which alien the bullet should be placed on. I also created a check in which commands an alien to not drop a bullet, if it is dead. I had a better result, but for some strange reason, the bullets appeared from the upper border. I played around with the subroutine, to work out what was causing this problem. Then set up a boundary for the bullet. Basically if the bullet tries to leave the top border and enter the screen, zero position the X + Y value of it. That helped me solve the problem.

Another small bug occurred in the game. After finishing playing the first game. I tested the pause/quit function to ensure the game works as it should. Unfortunately the game didn't quit, but made a CPU JAM in vice (A crash). So I did a little bug fix to sort out the problem. The game then seems to have been working okay. It looks as if now, the game could be finished. But I'll see what the testers find, that will cause problems to the game.

While I'm was waiting for a result. I have been composing some loading music for the game's tape loader system (Thunderload). Since the theme of the game is a 'Trance' based theme. The loading music ended up with pumping speed. The drums however didn't use the filtered kick and snare. Instead I set a different waveform to use a filter. The result turned out quite nicely. I have been working on making a tape master for the game. I am hoping that the result will turn out pretty good at the end. There was a slight error with the tape mastering, where I placed the loading text in the wrong place, but everything else worked quite nicely. That bug can easily be fixed no problem. :)

I'm not ready to release the game just yet. Hopefully SOON!

Let the Invasion Commence [Part 9]

25th September - 1st October 2016

Let's Invade was currently in the testing phase. Unfortunately not everything is quite ready yet although I do feel confident about an Autumn release of this game. Parts of the game code needed to be tweaked, the Health and Safety notice needed to be updated, and also the game char set needed a quick change. So I fixed those, however, I came across another obstacle. The alien bullet firing isn't random enough, and it seems the same alien shoots the bullet. Sadly this is still the obstacle I haven't got over with this week.  

During that obstacle, I felt slightly demotivated, and decided to code a little something else. That was of course a mini music demo called 'Mix Box 1'. Featuring 5 new unreleased tunes, and some oldschool look, despite the raster timing issues. I've never really liked timing raster bars.

Thirdly a disk menu for Reset's Craptastic was programmed, near complete, but requires raster bar timing.

Today, I got back to Let's Invade and once again, it was another frustrating session. I did some how manage to get the enemies to drop bullets randomly, by creating the wrapping round routine, but after a while, the same aliens were dropping the bullets. Yet again, I didn't manage to get over this obstacle yet. One day climb over the wall that blocks me, but it is a matter of when....

Let the Invasion Commence [Part 8]

18th - 24th September 2016

Earlier on this week, I did an upscroll for the high score table and also the end sequence. This time I wanted to add a little more code to make a much better ending. After all, I don't want the gamers to play the game to the end and be rewarded just an upward scrolling message, saying well done. Instead I wanted a scenario for the ending. So I drew two single screens, using CharPad, and then setup the attributes.I also drew some new sprites for the ending as well.

After the 2 screens were finished, it was time to code an ending, as a reward for the player to finish the game. I programmed the first scene, and set an interval before the next scene went on to the game. After the second scene was drawn on to the screen, I worked on getting the sprites animated and leave the screen, when required to do so. Then linked the overall thing before the end scroll.

I was very happy with the result so far, but noticed that the upscroll didn't work 100% on NTSC, although it worked will with PAL. After a quick fix, the game got submitted to two of my testers who tested and helped me with Honey Bee. :) One of the testers emailed me about the in game flashing feature. He suggested I should add a health and safety notice, like I did with Sheepoid. Also add an option to the notice to be able to disable the strobe effects. The front end also had a minor adjustment, where the squares around the logo was replaced by Asterisk stars, and flash. Apart from that, the game is now being tested.

Let's Invade is planned to be released in Autumn 2016, but not until it is 100% ready. The BETA testing is now in session. :)

Let the Invasion Commence [Part 6]

5th September - 10th September 2016

Quite a lot of hard work has been done with Let's Invade during the week or so. Most of this week, I have been concentrating on getting the rest of the levels in place into the game code, and finally got that finished. I was very pleased with the result, but some more work needs to be done on the invaders.

The invaders were not being able to use the full screen to move across during each level. If 5 rows of aliens were shot at either end, the other aliens would NOT stop moving to the end. So I made loads of macros to get the aliens to move how the Space Invaders would have moved in the first place. Once they got to a certain stopping position. The invaders move down 4 pixels. Unfortunately, there were loads of flickers over the aliens, due to sprites being called inside a raster split. I then move the sprites up each raster about 20 pixels. That was much better. Although there were still flickering aliens.

Next I generated some macros for the collision for each alien sprite. An alien should get shot according to which position the player's bullet is located, and the raster beam of where the alien sits. It resulted quite nicely, but after so much code had been produced. While I was still tweaking bits of the code, an unknown bug had occurred. Sadly the player sprite and the bullets no longer use the ASL ROR $D010 sprite expansion. I couldn't work out why this happened, when the synchronized loop in the game code calls for Sprite0, 1 and 2 to expand its MSB X position. The aliens MSB expanded okay. Maybe one day I may find the solution. If not, then I'll have to just go back to the previous backup of the code, and just work on the power ups instead, and leave the invader's movement to how it was before. We'll just have to wait and see.

Sadly not a good result :(