The Story of Stay Frosty 2, Part 14

Entry posted by SpiceWare March 1, 2015

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batari and I spent some more time investigating crash problems, we thought it was due to the C stack colliding with variable RAM but it wasn't. I figured out that changing the order of code would often fix the crash, though it wasn't clear to any of us why that should solve the problem.

Had a discussion on a health meter for the boss. I shot that down, preferring a visual/audio indication of denoting damage to the boss. I suggested flashing the screen, Nathan came back with:

How about when you hit it, it drops in brightness to dark orange, but "recovers" back up to bright orange? (But faster than the GIF shows.)

Or... what if we start it off a different color, so as you're hitting it, it changes color? Maybe every four hits? Blue, cyan, green, yellow, orange. Then it breaks apart on the fifth orange hit (20th hit overall). Each hit the fireball would dim and recover.

(So chemically, he'd be copper chloride, copper sulfate, borax, sodium chloride, and uh... orange. )

We went with the different colors. We also decided that instant-death for touching the giant fireball was not a good idea.

Tracked down and fixed a number of bugs, such as scrambled graphics on the menu:

scrambled snowman

Nathan came up with the idea for the rescue characters

Is there any room to add another sprite for a character for Frosty to rescue? After extinguishing the last fireball, something we could add to the "congratulations" page? Just a frame or two (enough to have them jump up and down) would be great.

Santa?

Holly?

Ms. Frosty?

Aprés Ski Barbie?

Carl Yastrzemski?

...

Shoot... just realized we need an AT-AT in the game.

Though I didn't think we had space to do them as I was running out of room in Display Data bank. Then cd-w spotting something that saved 352 bytes of ROM

I'm using the standard C memcpy() function to copy the image. Wonder if somehow the "size" became negative, and it interpreted that as a "copy backwards" instead of "copy forwards"...
You could try using a copy loop instead of memcpy. I found that those C library functions took up a lot of space in the code, so I removed most of them from the harmony driver.

Chris

I revised the horizon routines to support hills, caves, and additional celestial objects: moon, cloud, evil eyes and nimrod¹.

Implemented the melt trail logic. It wasn't as fancy as in SF1, but with the space we had at the time it was deemed good enough.

Updated graphics:

beat boss message
celestial objects
exit arrow
level (menu)
snowman graphics (not all yet in place)
start (menu)

Only half the snowman graphics were updated as there were some issues that needed clarification. To help see the graphics, I added a snowman slo-mo feature that is enabled by setting Right-Difficulty to B,

At this time 16 levels were considered done, so we'd reached the halfway point:

level matrix