The burger flock have found themselves in a forest. Originally I was going to have a photo of a forest. But I quickly came to the realization that just wouldn't do. So I had to draw one. At least it's in color since it's on the Game Gear. I came back to Game Gear programming after finding some Game Gear titles I didn't have on eBay. Next I made some background music for it. I made it too fast, but I fixed it. There were things I forgot I needed to do when I was programming this. Little things, l
Aaaaand, I'm back...to the Game Gear. I think Zipzap is finished, and I've downloaded ConText (despite automatically making my browser go to a PayPal paying page which I just clicked out of. Do they have to beg like that? If I wanted to give them money, I would. As a test, I successfully compiled what I had of Hamburgers En Route To Switzerland 2 for the Game Gear. Now the hard part: Thinking up of two more level locations. In the second Game Gear adventure, the burgers visit the moon, the jung
Yesterday I got extremely bored, so I decided to program in level 4, the ball bouncing around the screen level. Then I thought that level 4 was easier than level 3 so I switched them around so level 4 is now the robots and level 3 is the ball bouncing around. The purple background looks a lot more purplish and less pink on a real Odyssey2 console against O2EM. My package came today. The guy taped the box shut, but I don't really care, all I wanted was a working console with both controllers work
I changed the name of the game from Xybort to ZipZap. I didn't especially like the name Xybort. So I had to think of a new name for it that was 6 letters or less so it would fit on the title screen. I do like the name "Zap Master," but alas, it was too long. So I thought some more and came up with ZipZap. It's like zigzag, but you zip around and zap ufos, so it fits. Today I worked on level 3. In level three, the desert robots follow you around trying to get you to crash into them. Although I th
I wasn't going to work on it. But I got very bored and I thought "It wouldn't hurt to work on it just a tiny bit, unless something goes wrong." Something did go wrong on real hardware, but it was my fault. It was an easy fix. Apparently you can't let characters go off the screen. Why are the characters moving? In level 2 they are airplanes and are flying around. What's next to work on is connecting level 1 to level 2, so if you beat level 1, level 2 shows up. But I'll save that for another case
What was intended to be a quick update to the game turned out to be another off and on coding day. What I wanted to do was just put in some code to make the background and characters different for different levels. For example, value 0a3h holds the color for the background and grid (it doesn't matter about the grid since I'm not using it).
get_bg_color
mov r0,#levelnumber
mov a,@r0
xrl a,#1
jz level_1_forest
level_1_forest
mov r0,#0a3h
mov a,#21
movx
That is something I'll never do again. After a ten-or-so hour coding marathon, I finally got a good version of Xybort playable until the end of level 1. I went to work adding the boss in. This took longer than expected due to various crap happening with the program. And then I decided to make the code better. As you may have noticed if you played it on real hardware sometimes the trees flickered for a split second. I think I fixed this. But at the expense of adding another 'waitvsync,' which mad
So my break begins now. I felt I just had to do a couple of things before I went on it. I changed a few things:
Instead of pressing fire to go back to the title screen after the game ends, it does it after giving you time to read the "GAME OVER" text.
Enabled the high score saving.
Added a "LEVEL 1" message at the beginning and every time you die.
Bank 1 is 1115/2048 filled and bank 2 is 1155/2048 filled. I think what I'll do is put the boss code in with the main gam
Well, I worked on the game for a couple hours last night. Later this morning I got extremely bored, so I decided to work on the game even more. Here are a few things I added:
game over screen
lives counter
white UFO that shoots at you
changed laser beams to rings
That last one was a necessity. Since I was using the tree/ship collision code for enemy ship laser as well, it registered as a hit even when it wasn't touching. I had two options: Make more collision
After a couple months, I decided to get out the Odyssey2 and continue work on Xybort. After making version 9, I tested it on real hardware and discovered it didn't work correctly. So I basically spent all night trying to get it working on a real Odyssey2 and around 7 a.m. I finally got it working. I still don't know what the problem was, though. I cured it by making the enemy ship move continuously down and perhaps left or right a little bit sometimes, like in Xevious. After all, that's what I'm
So I sneaked a look at Oric assembly. It looks way hard. All I could do was print words on the screen. I figured even adding circles and lines is better than this. So I guess I'm just doomed to BASIC for a very, very long time. Nevertheless, I made some improvements to what I had in the title screen department. My title screen now looks like this:
I drew a little picture of a hamburger. Or as close to a hamburger as you can get in BASIC HIRES mode. But some sad news, all the items hav
So I got into dabbling with the Oric again. I am working with BASIC. Once I master it, then I will attempt to work with assembly. But for now, I made it play a little song on the title screen. I also made it so pressing a key stops the program.
I think I can get the handle of drawing a sprite by changing an ASCII character to resemble one. But in the end, the burger will be yellow due to the color constraints.
So one day I hope to make an Oric program. I doubt I will ever see it
I worked some more on the minigame and the bee moving code. Before I had it the bee moved every frame, but now it only changes direction when the fly does. Also, I made it so the bee flaps his wings better. There are two ways a game can end in the minigame: touch a bee, or make the fly swatting timer be 0. You have nine seconds to try to swat the fly without running into the deadly bee. I also took a few tries at redesigning a smaller bee. In the end, this is what people liked:
The fl
Today I spent some time working on the minigame portion of Frank the Fruit Fly for the Pokemon Mini. I think this will be my first full-fledged game NOT to get a cartridge release. There's just too few Pokemon Mini cartridges out there apparently. Someone told me it wouldn't be cost efficient to make a cartridge release of this.
So I put a bee in the minigame where you swat flies. Yes, that's right. In the minigame, the object of it is to swat flies. I couldn't think of something to do invo
So I had to go to the doctor's office today at 8 a.m. I stayed up until 4 a.m. Got a couple hours of sleep and then woke up at 6 a.m. Got there at 7:40 a.m. The check-in lady was asking me a bunch of questions I had no idea what to answer. Went and got a blood test. Right hand yielded nothing, but left arm got some, so they took some out of there.
Afterwards, I stopped at Burger King. To my surprise, they told me they no longer have strawberry milkshakes. That is so sad because they are the
I haven't posted anything to my webcomic for the past 9 days. This is due to the power outage I had for 6 days earlier this month. Not only could I not scan anything, I couldn't think of anything. I was too depressed to because there was no electricity. Well, once I got my electricity back, I decided to continue it even though probably no one reads it. I have to fill my day with something to do so I don't get bored, right? The previous comic is this one, from February 19:
I have been
First the bad news. I was eating some nachos when I started choking on them. I tried drinking some water but it wouldn't go down my esophagus. So I stuck my finger down my throat and a few coughs later, this red glob plopped in the toilet. I have no idea what it was. I don't remember eating something red whole. After that, I tried drinking a sip of water again. I could drink it. This is extremely weird because often when I choke on food, a huge red glob of something doesn't come out. Oh well.
So I'm inching ever closer to #350.* Today I got Chase the Chuckwagon in the mail. And what a surprise, it actually works! But in order to start the game, you have to press the game select switch like it was the reset switch. So there's this cute little dog in a maze with one obstacle bouncing around the screen, going through the walls. Sometimes it's a bone (which seems odd), sometimes it's this undiscernible orange thing. And then there's a gray man walking around. Touching the thing bouncing
Not much happening. I went on eBay and there were several pages filled with overpriced ones. Someone was selling one on Soap Operas for only $1.00! Too bad I already had it. So my collection is stalled. I worked on my cartridge, after about a month of not working on it. I now have 204 questions for it. I need 1,001, so I'm about 20% of the way there. I'm not sure if I can think of 1,001 questions. It's hard. My book is 8 pages long so far. And seeing how 8 x 5 = 40, my book should be about 40 pa
So I worked a little bit on Uncle Hairy's Nosehair. Three things I did.
I made the highest speed the nosehair can grow faster.
I changed the shape of the nostril. Just to see if I could. And I could. And it looks good to me.
I found the title screen music to be quite hideous sounding. So I made a new tune. For it to work good, each song I do for this game must have 32 treble notes and 16 bass notes. I composed a little song in the key of E minor because the TIA sounds are r
I got help with how to correctly save your progress through the game. It now saves three things:
level you are on
number of lemons you've got so far
your health %age.
Now I can continue on level making. This after I got rid of a bunch of excess code. This freed up an amazing 4 kb (!) of space to use for other stuff. The game is 32.07kB. It was 36.07kB. I put the lemon collecting as a side-quest. You don't HAVE to get all the lemons to beat the game, but I just though
Okay. I got this far with the Count's Castle game before I figured not many people would be interested in it, so I'm dropping it.
And my Count looks like Mr. Turniphead. Besides, I have other things to work on, like that lemon game I started a few years ago and never finished. Figuring out how to use INTV flash memory is hard. I don't know how but I managed to do it. I don't get how it saved the number of lemons collected, even when I didn't tell it to, though. I wanted it to do that,
So I finally got the right amount of bats on the screen:
There are five bats on the screen, and the number of bats is five. But I hit a roadblock: A weird bug. When I reset the game 39 times, the bats quit flapping. On the 40th reset, the bats disappeared. I have NO idea what caused that to happen, but I think I fixed it. I also made a floor for the (eventual) Count to stand on. I also had trouble with the scanline count. But through trial and error I made it a steady 262 scanlines.
I need a new bat sprite. After hours and hours of work, I FINALLY got it to work. Nine bats, and the Count will eventually be standing there as well (It's that little multicolored blob in the lower left of the picture.) It's multicolored just to see if I could make it multicolored. And because it needs to be multicolored. And I can't draw the Count, so someone will have to design that for me.
Yes, I know that's not 7 bats. And I will redesign the 7 so it looks more 7-ish. And the bats
I was rudely interrupted by a power outage for six whole days. I just now got the internet back for some reason. Yes, friends, I had no electricity between Feb. 13-18. Luckily, we didn't freeze to death thanks to the gas fireplace that doesn't use electricity. They said 90% of our area would be restored by tomorrow evening, so I was thinking we would fall into the unfortunate 10%. But shortly after 4 p.m., the power miraculously returned! But there was a problem: I had no internet.
But that
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