Today I worked on Golf a lot. While I was working, I ran into all sorts of problems, but I think I sorted them all out now. It leaves me wondering whether I'm trying to do too much stuff. Anyway, one of the things I did today was put clothes on the guy.
With the blue pants and blue water it looks like he's swimming in the water. Which is kind of amusing. Looking at the picture, I can simplify this further by just putting the blue golf club with the blue pants. In case I need to becaus
So with renewed interest in my Golf game I decided to work on it some more. One of the things I wanted to do, and did, was made the power meter faster. One of the things I plan to do is add an ending tune to the game. I have to compose one first. People want 18 holes, but I don't really have any more ideas for holes, so if I do make 18 holes, I'd need help with course designing.
I updated the Golf site with version 42 and also posted it in the game's AtariAge thread. Another thing I
Last night I had an idea for a new screen in my Fruit Fly game. So there's this giant ice wall and Frank can't get past it. Luckily for him, there's this fire-breathing dragonfly coming along. Using the fire coming out of him, the dragonfly can melt the ice blocks so Frank can get past it. Just make sure Frank doesn't get burned though. So dragonflies are just like dragons and can emit fire. They just don'r choose to because the whole earth would have been burned a long time ago.
So
Yesterday I decided to make the music for Frank the Fruit Fly longer so it doesn't start getting on your nerves when you play it. Level 1's music was ridiculously short, so I just extended it to about 25 seconds until it loops again. Level 2's music is now about 30 seconds. I could make them longer, but it is really very hard to compose music when you have just one audio channel to work with.
I also worked on the inside of the igloo and made it so you can fly over the exit instead of
I can't draw one. This is the closest I could come to a shark sprite with 8x8 pixels. I'm hoping someone else can do better than this.
But I think I got the code for the shark swimming around randomly working. The plan is to have him not be susceptible to torpedoes so you have to dodge him. I don't know though, since it's kind of hard to do. And changing the image that goes in is easy, so I just need a .png image. The most colors I can use in a sprite is 3. Anyway, that's what I've be
So I got a banner acting like a sprite. This let me make a big ol' giant octopus.
The giant octopus chases you around the screen. Although it is kind of easy right now to kill the thing. Perhaps I should make the giant octopus faster. I think I will.
I have yet to work on the shark, I have spent about an hour or so on this, and the rest of my time was spent working on something else. I woke up at about midnight or so. But that doesn't guarantee me being awake at noon, sinc
So I thought that the animation of Frank flapping his wings could be better. So I set out to make it better. Instead of 2 frames, it is now four, but one of the frames is used twice. Frank now looks like this:
I used a gif maker that apparently doesn't like to make images bigger. The original images are 8x9 and look much better, but Frank was hard to see so I made it bigger. Frank does not look this blurry in the game. I was asleep most of yesterday. And I'm still sleepy.
So nex
I used to have a website where I uploaded comics via an online ftp server. For some reason, last month it quit displaying the comics I uploaded. So I quit drawing them. But I got in the mood for drawing some more comics, but I have nowhere to post them, except for here. I do my comics in groups of 3. Since a sheet of paper is 8.5 x 11 inches. 3 comics fit perfectly on this page. Then I scan the page, enter Photoshop, resize the comics (I don't know why scanners like to make extra-large sized
So I took a look and tested what I had of level 2 before the igloo part. I needed to fix a few things. It should be running okay now. I also added some snow on the igloo screen (not the inside of the igloo, that would be crazy.) The way I think it is is if the largest Pokemon Mini ROM can be 512k, and if bankswitching is needed after 64k, then that must mean you can have 8 64k banks in a code. I've taken to sleeping on the couch at about 9 a.m. and not getting up until about 5 p.m. Today I w
Well, it took all night but I finally got a working version of Frank the Fruit Fly that is bigger than 64k. Not very much though, it's 67k. But a couple of people on the Pokemon Mini Discord helped me with it. So now what I'm going to do is keep working on it. I suspect I am going to have to move the code for level 1 to the 64k mark eventually since I would like to make an adventure with many different scenarios, screens, and levels. But that's not soon. When I get done with the second level,
I had an idea for a screen for Frank the Fruit Fly. I decided to have yet another wall block his path. This time, Frank needs to go into an igloo where the switch to remove the wall is located and press it so he can move forward. This took about a couple hours to do. Most of the work was making sure the coordinates for Frank's interactions were correct (or close). Odd screens though happened. Like in the igloo for one: Notice the upper right hand side is screwed up. I tried my best to make it l
I spent all of last night trying to make the game work. I had to do a bunch of stuff that made no sense in order to make it work. For example, there's a file included that isn't used except the text I was trying to do last night wouldn't work without it. Now that I have the text working, I modified it to add my own font which is like the score counter font: Like on a calculator is what I was attempting to make it look like. I made it so the bonus round comes every five levels instead of every
A high school senior prank may cost some local seniors $47. Why the teacher chose that amount is unknown, but what the students basically did was move the desks in the high school out into the hall and put hot dogs on the chalkboard chalk holders. And they might not be able to walk in the graduation. Seems kind of a stiff penalty for that, but hey, it's a 47 sighting. A day after I choked, I just now managed to eat a 12 inch Subway sandwich without choking. They never put enough mayo on, so I
So there I was, eating a fake chicken sandwich. When suddenly, I had one of my choking fits. So I rushed to the bathroom and puked up all the sandwich I ate. But then I tried drinking water, but it wouldn't stay down. Oh great, I thought. I kept forcing myself to vomit because I was convinced there was a little bit still stuck in there. But there wasn't. But I was still choking. Mom tried to help by giving me one of her herbal coughdrops. It didn't help any. I still couldn't keep even my own sal
So a whole bunch of games arrived in the mail today. First off, my 9 Game Boy games from that guy who put my game onto a cartridge who lives overseas came. I'll be keeping one, so eight of these will be on sale soon. And also, last night, I designed the final hole in Channel F Golf. It took a while since the idea wasn't too keen on cooperating with me, but I got it to work somehow. It was ten Game Boy games, but I made the mistake of showing mom one of them and she looked at it and commented o
Worked on Golf a whole bunch yesterday. I added a special putting meter so when you get close to the hole the score switches from red to blue to let you know you're putting. I can adjust how far away the ball is to the hole when it switches to putting mode. I don't know if it's my keyboard or the programming but pressing fire seems to not work sometimes, I have to press it a second time and try again after pressing the left CTRL button (I'm using MESS) and it not do anything. I discovered a ne
So two Channel F video games with their manuals came in the mail today. I will "review" both of them now. Hangman - This is a really good version of Hangman. Easy controls, twist left and right to move the letter and fire to guess it. The words are really great, too. One of them was "WEALTH," so makes for really good guessing. Alien Invasion - The Channel F's answer to Space Invaders. It really is just Space Invaders, right down to the ship flying by periodically. Makes one wonder why Taito didn
So I want to have a bonus level for GoSub every 10 levels, so it breaks up the action and makes it less monotonous. But I have no idea what the bonus level could be. Should I have a points system for the game? Should I add some lives as well? I think I will. I have lotsa room for mazes, so I want there to be at least 100 different ones. The bonus level could get you a chance to add more lives. But what should the bonus level consist of doing? I have 3 more levels to design before I get there,
It's been a looong time since I last saw my favorite number in media. Well, today it happened twice. The National Spelling Bee had 8 winners. The 8-way-tie happened because they successfully spelled the 47 tie-breaking words. And a crash just happened locally right near me on the news near highway 47. I try to put the number 47 in my game code whenever I can. Sometimes it fits just right, other times it's not too far off from what I want. In other news, I've been working hard on GoSub 7800 s
That's what I'm doing. While working on GoSub 7800, I had two levels, each with their own level checking code. I realized that if I had, say, 30 levels, it was going to be one out-of-control, huge glob of code. So I tried to rectify the situation. I looked through the 7800basic Guide to see what I could do about it. I discovered the 'memcpy' function. So while this made less code, it also made my program bigger. Instead of it being 32k, it is now 128k with RAM though. Apparently I need to do tha
It gets pretty discouraging when you work on something for hours on end only to have it be mostly ignored. Sometimes I don't even know why I bother. I spent this morning working on GoSub 7800, getting the treasure and octopus working. But I guess my game has been eclipsed by Arkanoid. I added sounds to the game. Crashing sounds and treasure getting sounds. And a torpedo crashing into an octopus sound. So I should probably just stop, but I don't WANT to. I want to keep working on it, but when the
The first steps of a GoSub port to the 7800 have been completed. I assume I can check collisions of the coral using the "peekchar" command. In the 7800basic Guide under 'peekchar' is "charvalue=peekchar( mapdata, x, y, width, height )" So what exactly is the value of charvalue? A 1 if there is a collision and 0 for none, or something else entirely different? I'm so confused on that. Well, anyway, it took about 5 hours to do. About an hours worth of this was cussing out the computer for saying
With only one hole left to design, I thought I might as well code the end. Since I had a whole bunch of spare room, I added an ending screen which displays your final score. I could even add an ending song if I wanted to. By the way, a final score of one is impossible. I just did that because I started the game on hole 9 for testing. I tried to design a ninth hole, but it ended up too similar to hole #5 so I threw it out and will try again. The ninth hole in there now is a test hole. At t
So I was trying to make a line of trees, like I did with the line of water used to make a stream. Couldn't, even after multiple tries. I was really sleepy all of yesterday because first off I only got a couple hours of sleep due to insomnia, and second, I couldn't sleep when I wanted to on the couch because the dog kept barking at the guy who was washing the house. I don't know why they decided they needed to wash my house, but they did. So after trying to make a line of trees, I FINALLY slept
So I worked on Golf last night and today some more. The title screen now looks like this: I learned that MESS widens the TV screen and I needed to make the screenshot 800x600 to see how it would look on a real TV. Went to sleep and got up at 2PM again. Noticed carlsson was having trouble with diagonal movements, so I looked in the code to see how I was controlling movements. It harkened back to the old days of the game where the guy could move anywhere he wanted. So now that he automatically mo
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord