Yesterday I tried to make it so the platforms didn't move when the player stopped. It ended in failure. But one thing I did do was make it so it works good on real hardware. I kept noticing it having some static at the top. My game was making the Odyssey 2 work like crazy. So I cut out the landing sprites so it's just showing the guy jump up all the time. This seemed to please the Odyssey 2 god. I have some room left so I think I'll put in fruit to get for extra points. I have some more room l
I spent most of yesterday working on the game. I tested it on real hardware. It was a case of the platforms getting too close to each other, causing garbled characters. On the Odyssey 2, if characters overlap, you get that. So I tried to fix it by making it so if the y position is too close, move it up more. I went to bed with a broken game. I woke up, and started anew. I had the bright idea of putting a noise in so I would know my code would be working. I thought I had it, but I went to test
I'd been working on this for a few hours earlier this morning. It's a Doodle Jump game for the Odyssey 2. The only trouble is, I had to make it so it always scrolls down since I couldn't figure out how to make it stop and be nice like it is supposed to. I got disgusted with the way it wasn't working, so a total rewrite was in order. Once I got that mostly done, I tried to make it so it stops, but I just couldn't figure out how to. I think the problem is I need to figure out the y position of eac
So I was looking through my blog posts trying to find out when I got my Atari Jaguar. The earliest I wrote about it was in 2008 when I was thinking about possibly selling it. Well, it's 10 years later and I still have it, so I didn't sell it. And I'm not going to, especially after seeing how high Jaguar game prices are on eBay. Power Drive Rally $150? I have that game and I doubt I paid that much for it. My upper limit for one game is about $100. Most of which those games are Pokemon Mini Japane
After a few entries to the Aaron the Aardvark thread, I decided to continue work on the game. I put in bombs and death for Aaron. The reason why I chose an aardvark is because it's a perfect fit for the name Aaron, much like Aaron the Aant. Although I don't have to double the As for Aardvark. In case you forgot, Aaron the Aardvark is a Jaguar game. I am extremely thankful to the people or person that made Raptor Basic + so I am able to do this. Although it gets me wondering how companies BITD di
I decided to give another go at putting some code from my Upmonsters game into this minigame. This time it worked, for the most part. You can now continue jumping on the same platform without risking it going away and scrolling down to disappearing. I don't know, though, it seems like I've made the game too easy. I wish someone could give me feedback on Pokemon Mini games, but the forums have been dead for a few weeks now despite my posting in them. I'm the only one who has yesterday and today.
I've been trying to stay up later so I can go to sleep later so I can lead a more normal life. Yesterday I went to sleep at noon instead of about 7am. Partly due to the fact that the neighbor's dog got loose again and came up to our window a couple times, and our dog kept barking at it. And it just stood there like nothing was wrong. Idiot dog. Oh well. I got up at about midnight. And I worked on the Pokemon Party Mini 2 game I was working on. Last time I worked on it was July 7 apparently. I
Last night I worked on White Water Madness some more. And when I was done, I worked on an instruction manual cover for it. I didn't do a very well job for it: I tried to get the fonts, but all the AtariAge links that I got when I searched were broken. It was hard, but finally I found a post saying it's Bauhaus, so I downloaded that. I remembered HammerFat, but I couldn't download it because, like I said, AtariAge's archive pages are full of dead links. I changed some stuff, made the items fast
I think I know what I am going to do with Frank the Fruit Fly. Level 1 will be the house. Your job is to guide Frank out of it. Frank starts his journey in the bathroom. Waiting for him at the other side of the bathroom is a spider. What you need to do is get Frank past the spider in order to get out of the bathroom. But why is Frank in the bathroom? I don't know. Ask the moths that appear in mine. I also have a title screen done. I need to add some music for it though. And I also need to a
I was looking through my website's files. It was very useful, as I had put a 15-page novel that didn't use the letter E on it. It would have been lost forever since my computer died and went to the great electronic garbage dump. So I put it on my new computer and continued work on it. I've been trying to make an actual story with a plot, but it's hard because A: The first novel I wrote was really zany, B: I want a story that's zany, and C: I can't use the letter E. This means I can't use the w
So I worked on this for about three hours today. I think it's finally done for now. What's more, I kept it under the 16k limit - barely. That was the big problem: Fighting it, rearranging code, removing code, adding code. While testing the game, I got up to level 13. I added lives. You get four lives at the start. The scoring is when you get past 5 clouds, you get a point. Losing a life makes you lose the points you gained since the level started, unless you have 0 lives left and the game ends.
I decided to take a break last night and play some Intellivision games that OTHER people made. Looking through my collection, I thought I'd like Buzz Bombers. I put in the cartridge. As it turns out it's a lot similar to Centipede. I don't like games involving shooting stuff because I'm a horrible aim. Even point blank I missed the bees. And the hummingbird doesn't really seem to do all that good either. All it does is get in your way of shooting the bees. So I played two rounds, and on the seco
It's been decided that the upmonsters are actually aliens, and they're trying to get back to their UFO. But before they do, they have to reach it, which is obscured by clouds that the upmonsters have to jump on, farther up and up until they get to it. Then, once they get close enough, the UFO's beam pulls them up inside, like this: And then a new level starts with an all-new upmonster. So that's what I've been doing all day: Working on this game, adding tons of stuff to it. I'm surprised I
I went to work on the Upmonster game again I've been making. After trying to fix the jump, I think I discovered why it was doing the high/low jumps: It had something to do with the way I was scrolling the screen. So I put in a bit of code and it looks way better. But then I had a bug in the 2 player game where it wasn't displaying the "P2 WON" message sometimes. I think I finally figured out why that was happening. But something seemed off. The upmonster was jumping on clouds, but the title sc
I spent some time last night and today to work on this some more. Technically, I got a game now. But it wouldn't be a very interesting one. Unless you call Street Racer interesting. So I'm going to continue work on it. I put in title music, and added a rock or log to avoid. Put in lives. Added a sfx for hitting the rock or log.
I had a bump in the river, but I discovered that since I wanted the screen to be full, the river needed to have different edges. So I did away with checking with play
So I have a list of Atari 2600 part numbers. The games near the end actually look interesting. Too bad they never made them. Jinks. Street Fight. Thunderfox. Looking for an Atari 2600 project to do, I came across cx26184: White Water Madness. Figured it might be a fun project for me to take on. So I spent about an hour making a title screen for it. This is what I came up with. The words "White Water Madness" with a guy rowing a raft across the screen.
I have never been white water rafting, t
Someone who was in charge of making the screenshots for the Fall 1988 INTV catalog must like the number 47 a lot... - Page 3: Body Slam Super Pro Wrestling - Over the T in the words "GIANT SPLASH" is the number 47. - Page 5: Pole Position - One of the scores is 4700. - Page 5: Super Pro Football - The number of Total Yards for the red team is 47. - Page 6: Slap Shot: Super Pro Hockey - The time left in the game is 16:47. - Page 7: Tower of Doom - The amount of Life Force is 147. - Page 8: Diner
I just got Nigel Mansell's racing game for the NES in the mail today. Working on all these games it makes me want to begin work on a game for the NES. Only problem is I don't know how to begin work on making an NES game. I figure it uses assembly, which I am using for the Pokemon Mini version of Frank the Fruit Fly. But I guess I don't really need to since most Pokemon Mini games are 4 Megabits, which is far greater size than a regular NES game. That and I gave up trying to bankswitch Game Boy g
They're not world-wide, but I put some webs into Frank the Fruit Fly. Last night I spent a few hours to put in the button thing where you push the buttons in the correct order in order to move on. I made this short YouTube video about Frank the Fruit Fly before I put in the buttons:
This is a really easy screen to get past, all you need to do is avoid the webs. At the same time while programming this, I am also making a players' guide. (Is it "player's" or "players'"? I know the apostroph
Yesterday after I posted my blog entry, I got bored. So I decided to continue work on Frank. After a few hours, I finally got it so pressing a button makes the game start. What's more is I finally got it to make a second song play. I went to sleep for 11 hours (couldn't get to sleep until 1 a.m.) and woke up and changed the second song from a test to an actual second song. It isn't a very long song, though. I want to have as much space available as possible for the game elements. Right now the g
So I tried with fireworks ablaze last night, to make Frank the Fruit Fly move on Pokemon Mini, but I had to give up and go to sleep with a broken game. I finally woke up at about noon, after my daily 12 hours of sleep, and worked on it again. FINALLY got it working, but I don't know how or why, the code I wrote doesn't make any logical sense, but it works anyway. Right now the game is 12.1 k. Once I reach 64k, I have to start with bankswitching stuff again. Whoopee. I tried but failed on the Gam
I got Championship Pool and Jurassic Park in the mail. They are late releases for the NES, both from 1993. Now it makes me want to buy homebrew games for the NES. I only have one that I've never played because I don't have enough room in my room for it: Tailgate Party. I doubt I could do it because space is limited, and I don't have a cornhole board. I do have the power pad, though. I also bought the camping games game. The NES, late in life, had some truly remarkable games on it. Kirby's Adve
So my boxes of Atari 2600 games in the garage were made of cardboard and the bottom ones were beginning to crumble due to the pressure of there being 5 of them stacked up one atop another. So I decided to empty them all out and put them in the bookshelf in the pantry. While unpacking them, I thought to myself, gee I should try one to see if they all still work okay. That one I picked was Video Pinball. I could have picked a rarer one, like Mr. Do's Castle, or Miner 2049er II or Master Builder, b
It is a hot, lonely day, so I decided to return to work on my Pokemon Mini game I was working on. I completed the Electrode minigame. I tested it a lot and I never once scored above 100 points. But I got so furious trying to pput more than one song in the game. It kept giving me a buzzing noise. So I made the song a third sound effect and that worked. Why is it OK that I can have more than one sfx and only one song? I must be doing something wrong, but I can't figure out what. Now I need to th
So I am looking at the game library. I like to collect games released late in a system's life. Looked up Cliffhanger on eBay. It was about $80. Last Action Hero was about the same. Disgruntled, I thought Jimmy Connors Tennis would be a sane price. Nope. It's even higher. Who would pay $200 for a stupid tennis game? I did however find sane prices for a few I didn't have: Championship Pool (October 1993) and Jurassic Park (June 1993). I thought I had Nigel Mansell's game, but I looked in the garag
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