Stay Frosty, Part 6

Entry posted by SpiceWare July 10, 2016

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Albert and I had a discussion about the ice and such:

Albert:

I like your idea of disabling auto-melt for nighttime levels. Is the idea here to collect all the ice to clear the level and progress to the next? Why don't the fireballs melt the ice?

Are the levels going to be differentiated in any way except different layouts of platforms? There's a lot of potential here to turn this into a full-fledged game of its own merit!. Lots of dynamics here with the auto-melting, the ice, the fireballs and the platforms you need to jump to being affected by your current meltage.

Me:

A lot of the ideas are from Nathan's post, just wanted to consolidate them someplace. I do see I left out the bit about the sun melting the ice blocks. I wouldn't be able to melt each block at a different rate(ie: melting blocks next to fire faster than blocks just out in the sun), but I think I can make all the ice melt down to just 1 or 2 scan lines in height with a minor change to the kernel - will try that tomorrow.

I'm not sure how many levels I'll be able to squeeze into a 4K game. I've not done any game play logic, sound effects or added all of the forthcoming frames of animation and I'm already down to 1K free. If there's room in the cart maybe it would work to bump it up to 8K for more levels.

supercat shared his page crossing macros(sbeq, sbne, etc) which I apparently forgot to use for this project. I eventually added them to macro.h, you can find them in the source for Collect.

batari OKed the bump in size to 8K for Stay Frosty.

Changes in this version:

8K - Kernel & Graphics in 1 bank, all game logic in another. This will insure room for a variety of levels plus Nathan's animation frames.
test of Melting Ice
Beginnings of platform check routine. The middle 2 digits of score show which PF bit(0-31, FF=no test) will first be tested for "on a platform".
hold firebutton to move slower
flicker animation of fireballs - 1 frame red, 1 frame yellow w/slightly changed graphics. Don't think I like it due to how much flicker there already is.
fixed Frosty's reserve lives nose color for PAL mode

ROM:
frosty071118NTSC.bin
frosty071118PAL.bin

Source:
sf_source071118.zip

Blog entry covers November 15-18, 2007