It's October 31. AKA Halloween. I have a Halloween present: A new level of Ugly Uppity Umpire.
I made a level with ghosts in it. What's the difference between a ghost and underwear, you may ask. Ghosts can go through walls, underwear can't. I thought up of the ghost enemy when I first thought up of the game. I just hadn't thought of a good reason to use enemies that can go through walls until now.
I've decided to not have a save feature or a password for this game. Instead,
It's actually a lot of them. I have screwed my sleeping habit up really bad now. I've been sleeping for a few hours every few hours instead of sleeping for 12 hours straight. Now it's 1 a.m. and I am awake now. So I tried to come up with some banana jokes for my banana joke book. I had one idea for a joke, but I apparently was in a really jokey mood because I filled up two pages' worth! Here's a sampling of my midnight work.
What month should you open a banana?
Sepstember.
It's almost 1:30 a.m. I can't sleep. So what do I do? I remembered my banana joke book. So I open it up and begin writing more banana jokes. Here are some more banana jokes.
How do they judge the bananas at the banana contest?
They grade on a curve.
Why was the banana a bad pitcher?
All it threw were curve balls.
What disease did the banana get?
Curvy.
Did you listen to the song about a big banana?
No, it was too long.
I ju
I just played Chip's Challenge. Not the whole thing, I got stuck on level 9 so I quit. But there's just somet hings that Chip's Challenge will have that UUU won't. Like the mud blocks that turn solid when water touches them. And perhaps even water. I've got about 39% room left in bank 0 (the game's logic bank). I guess if I need to I could put the title screen in a different bank, but I don't want to.
I added keys, though.
You can't go to the keyhole square unless you have
Now you can try level 1 of my new game I started work on yesterday. Download the game at the official Ugly, Uppity Umpires webpage. I fixed some bugs and changed some sprites, including the underwear sprite. They now look like this:
I've been having horrible problems with my mouse lately. It left clicks like Hell, sometimes dragging stuff I didn't even click on around. I tried to put this image in this blog. It ended up putting all the files in my folder in here, so I had to delete th
So I got bored with Frank the Fruit Fly. It happens: I get bored with something and want to work on something else. I wanted to try and make something like Chip's Challenge for the Game Boy. What came out of that was Ulysses, the Ugly Uppity Umpire. His quest is for umbrellas. Chasing him is a pair of dirty underwear. Let's face it: underwear is evil.
I need someone to draw a better pair of underwear for me. But this will have to do for now. What Ulysses needs to do is get all the umbr
That darn bug will not get squished. I was playing it and I noticed something: It only happens on a first run-through. Meaning if I clear it and then start back, it won't happen. So I have to close the emulator and open it back up every time I clear the room. So I tried yet another thing to try to stop it from happening. After about 10 times of exiting the emulator and opening it back up, it hasn't happened yet.
I don't know why it happens, so I don't know how to stop it. All I know
Another bathroom idea. This time it's for a new room in Frank the Fruit Fly. I spent a few hours coding and it's now in the game.
The game froze after exiting the level again. So I tried something new that I hope will work. I deleted a bit of code. It's really odd that it doesn't do that all the time. Why wouldn't it? I don't know.
The game will have at least one "exclusive" screen. All the others I've had to steal from the Pokemon Mini version.
I was thinking a
It's not something you would want to do when your air quality is "Unhealthy". So I'll be keeping them closed. But the house in Frank the Fruit Fly has windows that are opening and closing. Your job is to get into the house when the window is open.
The reason why the window is so thin is due to Game Boy technical reasons. Originally the plan was to have the window be twice as wide, and have 8 sprites make up the window. But the fly kept disappearing over the left side of the window due
So I bought a copy of Qix for the 5200 on eBay. This one comes with a box. I'm not too keen on buying games with boxes, but I figured I might as well get at least ONE boxed 5200 game. I jsut now finished working for an hour and a half colorizing my comics that were originally black and white. There were 9 total. I think they look much better than they were in shades of black and white. I don't know what I was thinking. Colored stuff is much better than black and white. Except in the case of Game
So I finally found the registration code for my Anvil Studio print sheet option which I had to pay $40 for a long time ago. And I finally realized the way to put it in so it's usable. And I like it much better than the original, it looks much more like "official" sheet music (whatever that means). This had way more options, like how big the notes are, how many can fit on a line, etc. And I experimented until I got a part to fit on one page. I attached what I got it to look like here.
I took some time to finish level 4 of Frank the Fruit Fly. The gist of the next two screens is: Frank is always moving right, no matter what you do. Your job is to avoid the spikes in the wall by going up or down (depending on which screen you're on.) Once you get past the second of these screens, you'll finish level 4. But since I haven't programmed anything about level 5 in yet, it'll just go back to the title screen.
If you touch the pointy wall, Frank will lose 5 (!) health point
So I put in the blank screens. I thought they looked boring, so I added tiny harmless fish that swim by.
I went to my local game shop. I got a Game Boy game. I didn't want to leave empty handed since it was hard to get there, so I walked out with a copy of Jurassic Park. I either had the others or they were just stupid sports titles. The Sega CD is still there, with a price tag of $460. They seem to price everything bananas.
Then I stopped at Burger King and got a yummy Whopper, t
I worked on Frank the Fruit Fly some more. The pain in my right wrist seems to have almost disappeared, which is good because it is annoying when I type. I don't have very many ideas left for level 4, so I'll probably put in a few "blank" screens which I've done since I worked on level 1. Right now I have 5 screens where something happens, I'd like to think of at least one more and then put in two blank screens and then begin work on level 5: the city.
I used a screen that I had in t
So I tried to play Frank the Fruit Fly on my Game Boy Everdrive. It just wouldn't work. No matter what I did it wouldn't work. So I went on Discord for help. Everything seemed to be correct. But it was someone who mentioned trying to set up my Everdrive's options manually. That's when it all clicked and worked correctly. I lost a micro USD card in the process, It flew out of the slot and I never did find it. That's the second time it happened to me. I never did find the first one either. Perhaps
I completely forgot about my banana joke book. It got hard to type because there's a point in my bone of my hand that hurts. And when I rest it on the hard desk, it emits a dull pain which makes it hard to type stuff. I have no idea how it happened, but it's been a couple of days now and it's really annoying. I thought for a bit and filled up page 8 (page ate?) Here are the jokes I thought up of today so far:
Why was the banana embarrassed?
His pants had a split.
Wha
Today I went back to work on Frank the Fruit Fly. I worked so hard, I think I have carpal tunnel on my right hand, it hurts at the base of it. I added in fish. Then I discovered it wasn't going from level 3 to 4. So I spent over an hour on just that, trying to make it link. Eventually I did. Then I fine-tuned the fish to make sure they were where I wanted them to be.
Then I fine-tuned the collision detection so it detects whether Frank touched the fish or not. For all the fish doing is
So I have been composing music. Here is a little bit of what I've been doing the last couple nights.
In order to make the sheet music, I had to install another program since the MIDI making program I use to make MIDIs does not have a free printing feature. I clicked on the "more info" button about buying one, but they said they weren't taking orders until Oct. 26. So I went to google and found this program that does a good job printing, but it doesn't support key changes.
Also,
So I thought since I bought a 5200 that I should clean up a space in my room for it. I put my X-box, PSP, and Dreamcast games outside my room. When I get around to it I will put them in the garage. I was looking at that comic I drew and thought I should clean up the letters so it's more legible. I really want to keep my handwriting in since most comics have what looks like writing instead of typing.
Even though I didn't really feel like it, I worked a little bit on Frank the Fruit Fly. I be
I remember a day when New Year's Day fell on a Sunday. It was 1/1/1995. Not one, but two comics ended on that day: The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. It was sad. I'm sure New Years Day falling on a Sunday has happened a few times since then, but it's going to happen again. Looking back, and forward, I was going to premiere a new comic on 1/1/2023. I drew a couple of comics called "A Gnome, a Gnu, and a Gnat." I drew two of them. Then I got stuck.
So I started thinking about how Gary
I ate fried squid at a Chinese buffet once. It tasted like you'd expect. I liked the fried part. They are hard to draw. In the Pokemon Mini version of the game, I drew what I thought was a good looking squid (well, as good looking as I could make one.) I tried to duplicate it yet making it look different at the same time. I don't really like this version of the squid, but seeing as how I achieved everything I wanted to do while drawing it, it will stay in the game.
Now that I actually
I went to sleep at about 8 p.m. I was so sleepy for some reason. Usually I don't get to sleep until about midnight. And I woke up at around noon. I don't mean to sleep 16 hours, but then again, if I didn't need to, I would get up. I don't know.
While I was up, though, I worked on Frank the Fruit Fly. It took less than a month to complete level 3 programming. Today's job was to put in the beginning of level 4. I made a soothing tranquil (IMO) song for underwater, because level 4 will
So I was having a lot of trouble with making the game know which tile Frank was on. Eventually I stumbled on the answer. I was using 8 bit variables. Their values go from 0-255. The y position of Frank in the equation I was using goes beyond 255. So I tried making the 8 bit variables be 16 instead. I didn't want to since their values go to way more than I needed. Too bad I can't use 9 bit variables. Well, that made it work. If only I had known this when I made GoSub.
I made some cacti.
I know. I could make it for the Game Boy Color and have it be really colorful. But I'm not going to so people who don't have a Game Boy Color can play my game. The Atari 2600 even beats out the number of gray shades the Game Boy can produce. Ergo, a scene where, say, a pineapple sitting in the middle of the desert doesn't look as good as it could. This is the best I could do:
If the pineapple looks familiar, it's because it's the same one from the title screen of my Atari 7800 game "Pi
I went and returned to work on my canoe game since someone posted good things about it on the videopac.nl forums, which I just learned will be closing in April. I'm wondering whether I should buy it to keep it open. But I don't know how much it would cost.
Anyway, once I got it working, I tested it on a real Odyssey 2. It still had some problems. So I went back to work on it. Now I think all the problems are gone. I had to fix some things to make everything appear on the screen. Appa
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