Working away at version for 0.013 and since I'm running away from the code I'll give a general idea what I'm planning on having this release do when I'm finished.

The display has been lightened up some already, but it's looking like trying to iron out timing issues with branches crossing page boundaries is going to be a nightmare. I did a manual count of the bytes to see how things would fall. As it turns out there was a branch crossing right on the boundary. When I did a little moving of code to fix that, I still ended up with some problems. The skipping I noticed before was less noticable, but in some situations still happened - but now only when the player crossed the vertical lines occupied by the hardware sprite updates. Additionally, the status bar started acting up again due to it being moved and resulting in it crossing a page boundary. I've undone the changes for now. I'll work on that in version 0.014 as well as try to finish up a bit more in the status bar. I'm seriously considering getting rid of the purple mana bar and replace it with something else. Something for me to think about anyway.

*cough*

As for what version 0.013 WILL do, is have an actual item! Up until now the sprites seen in the test roms have all been for the most part preloaded and hardwired info. There was nothing to change them, nothing to move them, nothing to even check if they're -suppose- to be displayed or not. This will change, although the object code I'm placing in this version will be the absolute minimum required - if I let it get too complicated right now I'll never finish. (This is why I've been procrastinating on the code since christmas)

So here's what will happen. I'll probably redo the data for the test realm and make sure it uses 8 bare rooms of various colors. Then the game will check a specific item slot in ram (to simplify matters.) for the Heart item. If the heart is not found, it will load the item into that slot, with random values for the room, X, and Y, and Input variables. Input is not a very descriptive name. It means different things based on the type of object. If the object was intended to move this is where it would look for what direction to move, for instance.

For the heart, which is just a hp-up item, the value of Input gets added to current HP when it's touched then the item vanishes. This means I can either randomize the hp restored from a dropped heart or make the item's value slowly decrease, or increase, over time. Perhaps making it vanish when it's Input equals 0.

I'm going to remove the HP alterating demo subroutine from 0.013. HP will be set to 0. There's not death condition in the code yet so I don't need to set it to 1. On startup the Heart won't exist so the game will quickly load one into one of the 8 rooms. Player moves about to find and pick it up. Their HP gage will fill slightly. Object is removed from the world and the game detects the missing heart so it recreates a new one. Again randomly placed in the rooms. This will repeat.

I'm not going to bother adding a "win" condition to this as it's just a demo. I'll also not bother limiting the hp. I'll let it wrap around, emptying when it gets filled too much.

I'm caught between having the hp restore happen gradually (at a rate of 1hp per screen) or all at once. All at once would be the easiest thing to do, but having the gradual restore might look better. Essentially I'd have the heart dump it's healing value into a different ram location which would then slowly be subtracted from and added to the player's health.

I'll probably attempt it just to see, but if it looks like it's going to be more trouble than it's worth, I'll probably remove it again for this version, if not for all.

I've lifted some random number code that I got off of either stella or the atari age forums. Probably both. It looks like it'll work well enough for my purposes.