Update on my progress and my first game outline...

Entry posted by wogihao January 9, 2008

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Ok today will be reading through the PIA information and makeing a pretty list like i did with the TIA.

more pondering of the playfield today - I think im getting closer to understanding it. funny how stuff like this leads on to tangents, I was sat there thinking "what if i wanted to do a multi level game with loads of screens - carts are avalible now with 64k of space.... " this lead onto looking at how to actualy write a game over 2k (fun but i wanted to save that till I had mastered the basics/fundementials).

On another point, the design of levels (for things like maze layouts). How do you generate maze levels without them being rippoffs of another game? Is there a utility that can generate a maze that i can then take as a template for a playfield? I dont want to use other peoples level design as it seems cheating to me...

I rember games like rogue and adom auto generate the dungeons, i guess there is a program out there that can do a similar thing (pity its beyond the 6507 chip to do this on the fly but then you cant have everyting i guess...)

Anyway the first project will be a maze game where the P0 character (not a plumber or a italian food inspired creature) will run round colecting tokens (yet to decide what these are) and will be chased by P1 characters (not supernatural creatures).

Ahh hell its a pac man clone. But im not hacking no existing roms, its all going to be my code from the ground up.

Outline spec:

Version 1:

a. it will be 1 player

b. there will be no sound (for the first version, i have enough to work out at the moment)

c. there will be 4 levels (or as many as i can fit into 2k)

d. it will be joystick controled.

e. it will work in PAL/NTSC/SECAM/PAL+ (to be honest this is the easyest one to meet in the codeing just have a compiler option)

f. it wont flicker like pac man on the atari

g. it will be responsive (as good as i can make the controls)

h. there will be monster vunrability tokens scattered around the level.

i. monsters when comming into contact with the P0 will kill it.

j. if the monsters are vunerable and P0 collison occurs then the monster will die.

k. level is populated with a number of tokens, when the tokens are all taken (through collision with P0) then the level is finnished.

l. the tokens on colision with P0 will be removed.

Version 2:

a. will have a high score

b. will show the score on screen

c. will have primitive sound (on obtaining a token, death, level sucess, game over, monster vunerability mode, monster death)

d. will have more levels (thus takeing it into the 4k+ range)

Its quite a complicated first program but i think i will learn alot doing it this way.

On another unrealted note..

I have been looking for Secam carts on ebay (the french one) and its a nightmare, the one auction i could find looked to be nothing more than a bunch of PAL carts miss labled when he started the auction. I guess because they run on the system they dont care :ponder:

never mind somthing will come up.

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wogihao 0

Posted January 9, 2008

Right straight off the bat i can see this project would kill me at my current ability, the colision dectection with even the maze element will be chalange enough.

there will be no monsters, no tokens.

the p0 character will have to navigate through a series of mazes of increaseing complexity.

I found with a google search a number of maze generators (and a dungeon on i will save for the future).

with this simplication of the inital spec i can concentrate on a smaller number of task that hopefully will not present the masive challange of the orignal spec.

All i have to do now is...

a. generate the 4 maze levels in some utility- DONE
b. plan the playfield - Pending
c. create a screen with the playfield for the levels. - Pending
d. create a p0 - just a block at first - Pending.
e. get p0 moveing - Pending.
f. create collision detection for the playfield and P0 - Pending.
g. set the start and end points of the level - Pending.
h. check the level progression works - Pending.
i. create a decent player sprite - Pending.

Possible problems.

With the maze a large player will present some collision movement issues, if the sprite is to big then it will make fitting the maze on the screen thats chalangeing difficult without obsureing part of the playfield. As i imagned that the maze would be contained within the boundaries of the tv screen therefore this presents a problem with a large character - So i would imagine that the character sprite will be very basic.