Stand by your Llamas - The Alpacalypse is coming

4th February 2013

Stand by your Llamas. Engage defences as an Alpacalypse is coming - well, near your Commodore 64 and WinVice of course. I have been very busy the past few weeks (despite problems on get graphics in place) bringing yet a sequel to the Jeff Minter tribute "Sheepoid". It's called "Sheepoid DX". It is a fun cute game inspired by the classic Laser Zone, which Jeff wrote back in the early 1980's. Compared to Laser Zone, Sheepoid DX is somehow different. Especially when on later levels, the aliens start moving diagonal directions. One sheep would have to defend the other.

Sheepoid DX consists of 24 levels, in which the world is under threat of an alien invasion - or to put it another way an Alpacalypse. Two sheep have been transported into a incoming mother ship. A funny discovery was made, that there are 24 different neon vortexes, which give a strange vision for the sheep. One sheep is placed at the bottom of the screen, and another is placed on the far right. They have to defend themselves from ongoing invaders of each zone, simply by bleating pulse waves at them - so the aliens get destroyed. The player can also rescue sheep to gain smart bombs, those get activated with the space bar. The player's sheep has to try and avoid shooting the incoming sheep. If those poor little blighters get shot, 1000 points gets deducted from your score. No matter how far you get, it can be possible to end up with a very low score if you keep shooting the sheep.

Unlike the original Sheepoid. This game is more polished, with amazing graphics by Trevor Storey. The front end presentation looks similar to the original title screen from the first Sheepoid. The game has some better features installed. I still added the scrolling void in each neon vortex, but Trevor did amazing level graphics, which I am sure you would love a lot in this version of the game. I also removed the witty captions to make way for a better effect. The lazer beams. These are to make it look as if each invader is entering the vortex.

There are still some old Yak style favourites such as the camels (They still roam level 2 of this game), the Ancipital goat type of creature, but the majority of the enemies are completely different compared to the original Sheepoid.

I had a laugh with some of the ideas I wanted to implement into Sheepoid DX. I thought it would be quite funny to add a funny phrase for engaging a hidden cheat into the game (That was yesterday). I also had some fun playing around making music and sound effects using a music editor I had never used before. SidWizard in fact. SidWizard's awesome. So if you want to be a C64 composer, I recommend that you try it.

Well, the main game of Sheepoid DX is finished (I hope) and it is just the final mastering to finish off. I'm releasing this along with Woolly Jumper, hopefully via Psytronik Software and RGCD in a month's time or possibly over that period. It will be worth the wait I can promise you.


There are

Sheep VS Aliens

17th January 2013

I have been mighty busy today with a project for RGCD. Not much will need programming. The changes are more on a graphics front. Back in 2011 I released a game called "Sheepoid". Also I did Sheepoid 2 - Woolly Jumper. Well, since we are in the subject of sheep. I was asked if I could make a much nicer version of Sheepoid last year. Well, good news is that Sheepoid will be updated. RGCD's Woolly Jumper was originally planned for a release on cartridge, but I decided to work on Sheepoid DX as an extra for it. Of course I'll be launching Woolly Jumper (with the new jump) on disk / tape for Psytronik Software along with this game.

So then, what changes are going to be made? For a start off, all existing graphics will be replaced with brand new ones. Smila has provided me with some mockups of levels and new graphics for sprites and text charsets. This really impressed me. The major drawback during last week was that. I have been banging my head trying to build tiles out of the existing character sets converted. I never have been good with jigsaws :). Good news is that I have managed to build elements/tiles and I have started building the new level screens today. I managed to get 5 level screens built using Endurion's Element editor. A tool, which was originally created for him to build and develop elements for his game Soulless. The tool eventually got released, and can be useful for anyone wanting to design levels using additional sized tiles/elements. Basically a PC style Multi Screen Construction Kit :)

As you may know like all other projects, this project is going to be a very slow process - due to that I am always losing free time due to the 12-8 work pattern. Hopefully when Sheepoid DX is finished, it should look neat. Anyway, here's a little mockup I have made to show you what the game is intending to look like :)

This is only a mockup. No actual screen in place of source or altered code yet.

Flash Bang, What a picture

26th February 2011

Earlier on last week I have been working on new sound effects to suit the game. I'm much happier with the sounds, but there are some effects missing. Many of the great Yak's psychedelic games used options to use strobe effects. So I decided to implement and program some strobe effects for when either the player dies or when an alien gets hit. Before I done this, the Game Over and level complete was lacking some colour over the text. I also wanted to change the Level Complete sequence a bit as well. So to make Level Complete much better. During the bonus countdown, the void scrolls downwards faster. Then I added a routine to remove the whole game playing background by filling the screen with the level's void. Then I added a colour wash routine on the WELL DONE text, followed by the GAME OVER text.

Once I was happy with the Well Done and Game Over text, I had a task which was to make the player lose 1000 points if a baby sheep was shot. So I programmed a little routine, which would deduct points off the player. If the very first digit was detected as a / when decrementing the value, I added a routine which makes all characters 000000 otherwise this would have been a bug in the game. Once that was done, I tried it out. Now the players will be LESS inclined to shoot the baby sheep, and will have to save them. Therefore the game is more challenging now.

One final routine to add was the in game strobe effects. I decided to only use $D021, because if I used $D020 as well, you could see the flicking spots at the bottom of the screen where the raster split lies. Plus using $D020 as well as $D021 could be too much for the gamer as well. I used two colour schemes for the player. I used the blue effect per baddie shot, and I used the orange/red effect for the player death. Something disappointed me though. I should really do an effect, which says NO for when a baby sheep dies, but I have unfortunately run out of memory for my code. There's just too much there for this little tweak. There might be a solution to the problem, perhaps I should reproduce the title screen using the Multi Screen Construction Kit. That will preserve $0400 spare bytes to expand my code a little for the sheep death effect. Which I shall do tomorrow. Then it is on to the improvements/tweaking of the game sprites and then the final phase bug fixing. Once all final phase fixing's finished. I'm ready to release this game to Psytronik Software. :)

Let's go Psychedelic ... Baaaaaah!

15th February 2011

The past 2 afternoons, I have been working on Sheepoid - again :). I think so far the game's coming out quite nicely. Yesterday afternoon, I was working on the end part for the game. To build the end, I captured the field at the bottom of the screen and turned it into a straight field, without the upwards field from level 1. Then I saved the colour and screen data of the modified field.

After that was done my next task was to program some imaginative ending in a style of Yak the Hairy. Well, I could not really think of much of an ending and opened my imagination. Caught in the world of psychedelia. I decided that I had no option but to do an ending where there's a washing machine, someone throws a brick into it while the wheels are spinning and then self-destruct. Nope. I could have done that I suppose. Nah! What I really done was based it where a space ship lands back on to the field. The sheep jumps out. The space ship takes off and then the rest of the ending - a big surprise. I shall not tell you, but it does involve some hairy beasties :)

Today I decided to redesign my front end and implement it into the code. The first thing I did was remove those horrible looking thick raster beams. Recreated the title screen logo. It looked too much like 1985 or something like that. There was also too much flashing, so I decided to do away with some of it. I added an extra raster split and programmed a routine for the top scroll text. I put the flashing text on to the PRESS FIRE TO PLAY message. The top scroll was made for a purpose. After playing Revenge of the Mutant Camels and Sheep In Space, I decided to base the high score table on typing silly phrases of 40 characters. Just the way how the great Yak did for those two games. I also added a scroll text which scrolled the high scores across the front end slowly.

The worst part had come for the front end. I wanted to get rid of those horrible colour bars and replace them with something that would look much nicer. Any guesses? Yes, that's absolutely correct, demo-style raster colour bars. Glerk! They're easy to program into the raster split, but the worst part of it for me was timing the darn things so that they are straight. So I spent about an hour or so fiddling around with the timing tables and come up with a nice looking front end.

The last part I did today was updated the music using Goat Tracker. I wanted to make a modern version of the title screen tune for Sheepoid, as just using one sawtooth instrument was so 1984. So I added a few leads and also some drums (Oh no, Master Bayliss is going to put some techno/trance style beats to the production - gibber!). Then I altered the notes to play a rock-style tune for the title screen. No techno/trance for a change. Then I imported the remixed version of the sawtooth tune into the title screen code. It turned out very well :)

Sheepoid - Progress so far

Saturday 27th January 2011

Bleatings everyone :)

This shall not be a big blog, as I have a little update for you - or probably a huge update of my progress with Sheepoid and some other news about this game. Just for now as there's not really any new designs, etc to show you but here's some stuff I have to mention about this game so far.

Well today I've mainly been drawing the sprites, and manually typing in the sprite frame tables inside the ACME cross assembler. But I could get more done later on today :) So far I managed to get 4 levels active - as I have been struggling with the Laser Zone char-style explosion routines, which thankfully were working correctly after a week or so. With special thanks to C64 programmer and TND's contributor, Achim Volkers. The explosions of the enemy are starting to look a bit like laser zone, but I added some additional enemy disappearance sprite, which was an animated diamond/star that shrinks (while the chars fly through the screen diagonally).

As well as the explosion effects, I started implementing random X-Y directional speed, delay and colour of the enemies (according to the levels which they are on) and silly 1-liners. This made the game feel very Jeff Minter like and ideal for a Llamasoft tribute game. The other things I added were the enemy types as well per level. I only have 4 levels working right at the moment, but there's plenty of time for me to implement all 24 levels of game play. :)

Today I have just finished drawing all of the sprites (From $80-$FF) using Cellux/Face's Sprite Editor V1.2. All of the captions have been typed down in the source code. I also extracted the Sprite Data and imported it into the source code, ready for compiling.

There's some other things I have in store for this project but I shall not tell you. You'll just have to wait. ;)

The Cyber Sheep are coming

Friday 7th January 2011

Laser Zone. What a classic game that was for the Commodore 64. It's quite a memorable little Arcade classic, which was on a compilation of crazy and really fun games, called "Yak's Progress" by Llamasoft. After playing Laser Zone, I came up with a nice idea for a tribute game. The game's name is Sheepoid, and last night I was just playing around with some raster splits and experimenting. Okay, so no game yet, but I ended up building a front end for the production instead. Probably a wrong move.

Anyway about the game. Laser Zone had two satellites in which had to blast aliens that appeared on screen before they reached to right or bottom surface and captured one of the satellites. The plan for "Sheepoid" is pretty much similar, except for that the game will have some differences. The starting levels may be quite similar, but the actual game itself will have some differences in attack waves - causing this game to be more zany and psychedelic than before. Instead of satellites, the player will be controlling laser powered sheep. Also instead of a small screen area being used. The sprites will use expanded positions. Therefore the game area's going to be pretty much big.

The official release date of this game is not really known as there's quite a bit of work to do, but I doubt that it'll take longer than 2 months or so. I will not be rushing on this game for a sake of a quick release, as there is seriously no point in rushing it for a sake of a quick release. Hmm. :)

When the game is finished, it will feature a variety of different aliens/psychedelic objects to battle against, wacky sound effects, bizarre get ready , level complete, life lost, game over messages, a possibility of an end sequence. Plus a nice looking psychedelic IRQ tape loader system as well. The final production will be uploaded on to my web site at: http://tnd64.unikat.sk.