So the internet quit working yesterday. I decided to go to sleep at about 1 p.m. since it's no fun being without the internet. I woke up at 4 a.m. and the internet came back an hour later. I got Klax and a 6-button Genesis controller in the mail while I was asleep. It's hard to tell the Klax designs apart on a Game Boy. After testing my 6-button Genesis controller (I can now do God Mode in 32X Doom.) I went to work on beginning the boss in HERTS3 for Game Gear.
I should try Klax on my
It's not even half way through morning and I've spent about 90 minutes today trying to beautify my Game Gear game. For it being a color portable, it sure doesn't have that many games. Game Boy has the better library IMHO, even though it's in black and white. Anyway, I made it so when I turn the screen off it is black instead of a reddish purple. I also made the nachos and pepperoni slices behave like homing missiles, following you and moving left at the same time. The onion rings don't do this,
Let's say you are tired of video games. Then what is a great way to pass the time? Why, making and solving crosswords of course. My grandma got me started and hooked on them. After a few, I decided to try to make some. Not only did I get hooked on solving them, I also got hooked on making them. I like the odd grid shapes of the TV Guide crosswords from their inception to around 1990 when they stopped being so odd and began to "normalize". I began to make weird grid designs, odd placement of blac
Most of today was spent sleeping. I went to sleep at around 7 a.m. Didn't get up until at least 8 p.m. Then I worked a little bit on Jack and the Beanstalk, making the code simpler. The only thing I added were stairs on the second floor of the castle, which are to lead to the third floor. I think the total number of rooms I'll have in the castle is 56.
I first thought the way the code to hide the key would work would be to get a random number to get a room number and put it in there.
I haven't been sleeping much. I hate sleep. It's so boring laying there waiting for at least a half-hour. My mind keeps thinking of stuff I'd like to do and rather be doing. I only got 6 hours of sleep because of this. I went to work on Jack and the Beanstalk. I added in the stairs. All you have to do to use them is touch them.
For example, touching these stairs:
will get Jack to the second floor:
If Jack touches these stairs, he'll go back to the first floor.
Jac
Here is Jack in room 1 of the castle.
I decided to make the castle like this so I can place stuff freely in it and if it touches the wall, Jack can still grab it. Jack can't move yet, but I designed a walking Jack (as opposed to a climbing Jack) Of course making the grid like this requires more bytes (just my luck) so I am probably going to have to scale back the number of rooms per floor. I'm aiming for 15 rooms. So that means there will probably be 8 floors (a big castle!) I snuck a
One of the things I like to do is create little poems and put them to music. I have two collections of musical poetry. Each song is 28 seconds long. I don't know why I chose 28 seconds isntead of 30, but oh well. Each CD has 66 songs on it. I'm working on #3. I'm calling the albums "Golf Balls," "Golf Balls 2," and now "Golf Balls 3." GB3 will be the first collection to have a little book with all the lyrics in it. Here is a sample of what the poetry is. This one is called "The Ant Show".
So I was playing version 66 of Uncle Hairy's Nosehair when I noticed when I finished a game and the music was playing, the b&w colors changed once randomly and then never again. I set out to find a reason why. I ultimately found that I was uisng ora #15, which made the colors be the brightest. And when you only use one set of colors, it doesn't change because grayscale is one set of colors compared to the rest of the colors.
Normally this would be a quick fix, but there was an ex
I had to go to the post office today. The stupid, unhelping masks are back to being required again. I'd love to say more, but, you know, politics. This required getting up out of bed. Which was hard because I had insomnia last night and didn't get to sleep until about 4 a.m. But I got 7 hours of sleep, so at least there's that.
Got home and worked on Jack and the Beanstalk. While testing, I found that the bats always seem to find a way to hurt me. So I turned off the collision by com
I was going through all the stuff in my bathroom when I saw a Tiger Game.com and AC adapter. I plugged it in and turned it on and it works. Which is weird because I thought my working Game.com was near my bed in my room. So I went back to my room and near my bed was another Game.com. I took the AC adapter and turned it on. After one try, it worked. So apparently I have two Game.coms. They're multiplying.
Which is fine, I guess since I have a complete game.com collection. I have a com
So I worked on making another enemy. At first I wanted the enemy to be another bird, but it was clear it is impossible to draw a bird using only 64 pixels and one color in an 8x8 sprite and make it look like a bird. So I drew a bat. Actually, I took the bat from my Count's Castle game, changed it a little, and put it in.
Like about half the time, though, the bats overlap each other. It gets me really annoyed when it does that. More proof computers have minds they use to annoy us.
The problem with big birds in my game is that when it comes to the part of the vine you're on, you have nowhere to go. So I made the bird small again. I also figured out that I can only have 36 (255/7) screens for the stalk. And less than that since I need to free up part of that to fit in the code to draw the grid. So I will try to have 30 different screens. And have the castle consist of 30 screens as well.
I found and fixed a bug pertaining to down movement. I did something similar
A major change I made to Jack since yesterday is I made it so he can't fall off the stalk. This allows me more creativity in stalk designing since Jack cannot simply fall off to avoid parts of the stalk. This means Jack must climb up a lot. I made his arms reach up more when he's climbing.
I have a tip for maneuvering on the stalk: Try to stay in the center of the screen. When the stalk is at the edge of the screen, stay towards as center of the screen as you can. This will allow you
I worked on the title screen. Instead of it just saying "JACK", I now have Jack on the screen with the ground and a nice blue sky above.
When you press fire, he walks to the right side of the screen and ends up at the beanstalk to begin your game. If Odyssey 2 could make different colors for the grid, I would have made a nice violet house for him to come out of. But it can't so I didn't.
I redesigned the beak so the bird looks good going from either direction.
I
So I worked a bunch on Jack and the Beanstalk last night and earlier today. I tried to plan ahead by moving the stalk data around and shortening it, removing the unnecessary 000h's.
I made the bird bigger. I think it makes the game harder. I also added a beak for him. I know black birds have black beaks, but this one doesn't. Or perhaps I should change his color? I discovered that one could pass a lot of stalk by simply falling, so I had to cut that part out and redesign the stalk.
Over a decade ago (time sure flies!) I made a game for the Atari 2600 called "Jack and the Beanstalk." Somehow I managed to get an idea in my head over a decade later to attempt to port the game to the Odyssey2. If I get to finish the game (sometimes the computer won't let me), I want to make it 8k. I did manage to find out if I put the new Cedar Games intro in the game, I can't have anything else in the bank. So in the Jack game, I need to first make the intro, and then switch over to another b
So I finally figured out that a game about poop wouldn't probably be good. So I took the game, changed the sprites around, and renamed it "Save the Puppies!"
"Giant tarantulas are in town and their diet consists mainly of dogs and humans. What's worse, you volunteered - before the giant tarantula invasion - to round up all the loose puppies! Can you save the puppies?"
The poop to get has now been replaced by a puppy, Nincom is now a human, and the flies are giant tarantul
I fixed a major bug I wanted gone. The problem turned out to me omitting something. The problem was here:
if ((findingaspot==1) && (levelprogress<14)) itemx=(random_number % 18)+2, itemy=(random_number % 8)+2;
lookitup2=((itemy-2)*20)+(itemx-1);
if (whichtile2==1) findingaspot=1;
if ((whichtile2==0) && (findingaspot==1)) findingaspot=0, itemx=itemx*8, itemy=itemy*8;
It was looking up the spot to see if the item was okay to place ANY
Worked on Nincompoop again today. I made it so you can turn on and off the in-game music with Select. And pause and unpause with Start. Made another level. I still have to compose level ending music and level 2 music. Right now to complete a level you only need to get 4 poops, but that will change to 47 when I'm done testing the levels.
Level 3 is all crazy (there are no poops to get and you can go through walls, which are the same as level 2) because I haven't programmed the specifi
I finally got the fly in. Somehow I keep breaking the poop's collision detection and it goes inside the wall. I don't know how. But I fixed it, I think. I added the fly. After a randomly decided number of seconds, he starts at a random x position at the bottom of the screen and travels upward. Once he reaches the top, he disappears and it starts again. If Nincom touches the fly, he loses a life and a buzzer will sound. So I added lives to the game. I got rid of the level number info because that
So I have been working on a Boggle puzzle for what seems like a million years now, trying to fit 9 answers in a 5x5 space. For those who don't know, a Boggle puzzle is like a word find only the letters aren't necessarily next to each other and can be diagonal and meander all around, like the words you'd find if you were playing Boggle. I started doing these a long time ago after seeing a couple in Games magazine.
I had 8 answers, but I was certain I could fit 9 in after I thought of a good
So I got really bored and decided to work on Nincompoop again. I put in a title screen with a song. I went to sleep, woke up 9 hours later, and listened to the song again. I changed some of the notes in it in an attempt to make it sound better.
I made a website for the game that will have the latest ROM on it. It is here. It looks as though I may be able to put in some more stuff since I'm only using a little more than half the 32k I'm allotted. So, next time I work on this (I don't k
I worked on Nincompoops a lot. I saw there was a Game Boy coding jam, but I doubt my stuff is good enough for it, so I'll pass. Anyway, the game now looks like this:
I redesigned the font, the blocks, and the sprites. Today I put in some sounds. I don't know why, but I couldn't get one of the sound channels working. I copied working code I made into this program, and it wouldn't work. So I used the other channel which is used for muisc-y stuff and made a pleasant sounding "ding!" when
Math is hard. Math is especially hard if you don't have a full understanding of what you're programming for.
I tried to make GoSub for the Game Boy. I failed miserably. But out of that failure came a new game to work on. I call it "Nincompoops." You are Nincom Poop, and your job is to rescue the other magic poop that magically appear when the magic toilet flushes. This is what it looks like so far:
Literally, hours were spent trying to make the code just right so the poop couldn'
I decided to get out my Game Boy games. The GBC was with them. I played a couple of games. Then I reminded myself of the fact that I was working on one. I went and worked on it a whole bunch yesterday and today. It now looks like this:
The background changes after each wave and is chosen randomly. I got out my original Game Boy. I discovered its screen cover fell off. I wonder if I can glue it back on somehow. The alternate battery thing still works fine. I went to the webpage that h
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