ZETA WIP

[MausGames]

This was an experiment with very large maps. 100 Chambers for the first area alone!

Use the Select Switch to see where you are! The first area only has one exit, so far nothing happens when you get to it.

Now that I have a ship exploring a cave, I'm not sure what to do with this. Suggestions?

 

 

 

ZETA1a.bin

Edited December 24, 2007 by MausGames

[SeaGtGruff]

This is great; it shows a lot of potential! After I was flying around for a while, I thought, "It would be cool if there were a map you could pop up." When I came back to your post, I saw that there *is* a map-- just press SELECT. D'oh! What would be really nice, though, is if you could have the map show which locations you've already visited, such as displaying those locations in a different color. I know you're using the playfield to draw the map, but maybe you could use flickering for the map screen. By flickering two background colors with two playfield colors, you can get four colors to draw with:

 

Even Frames (0, 2, 4, 6, etc.) = COLUBK_0, COLUPF_0

Odd Frames (1, 3, 5, 7, etc.) = COLUBK_1, COLUPF_1

 

Color 0 = COLUBK_0 and COLUBK_1 flickered together

Color 1 = COLUBK_0 and COLUPF_1 flickered together

Color 2 = COLUPF_0 and COLUBK_1 flickered together

Color 3 = COLUPF_0 and COLUPF_1 flickered together

 

Anyway, what you've got is great. The cavern looks really cool-- it has a "natural" appearance to it-- and I love the way the playfield color gets brighter/darker, following you around as you descend and ascend.

 

Where to go with this? One idea might be a rescue game, where you have to find your way through the cavern, locate, and save (pick up) people who are trapped in the cavern. Or maybe the cavern serves as an underground enemy base, and you must blast your way through the enemy's defenses, seek out, and destroy all of their weapons depots, or command centers, or whatnot.

 

Michael

[+Random Terrain]

Since this would be compared to H.E.R.O., you might want to stick to a treasure hunt of some kind. Hopefully, randomly placed treasure. Since you have a lighting effect, maybe there could be randomly placed cave creatures that you can only see within the strip that is lit up. They might ignore you outside of the band of light, but once inside, they might attack and you'll have to be quick and shoot them or move out of the way so they'll be in the dark again.

[Fort Apocalypse]

Really awesome! It made me think of being underwater, the way the ship sinks slowly. If it is meant to be underwater, some underwater enemies might be cool. If not then may need to have acceleration downward to better mimic higher gravity? It might be good to use acceleration overall to make movement a little more realistic, but that might make it too hard to navigate the cave quickly (so may need to move/accelerate slowly). The caves are really nice!

 

I also thought it was fun to see how deep I could go. Maybe it could be either a deep sea dive or journey to the center of the earth type of thing. Either way, maybe as you get closer to the center of the earth, maybe the walls get hot(?) and you lose life/energy by touching them? Level completion by finding a base or treasure might be good.

[gambler172]

Hi Maus

You want suggestions?What about some enemies in the game?Maybe some keys,to open special areas????

Or some power ups????You could do so much with this.....Hope to see more.

greetings Walter

[SeaGtGruff]

It made me think of being underwater, the way the ship sinks slowly.

What with the ship being a spaceship (or it looks like one to me), the slow-falling reminded me of the low gravity of a small planetoid or asteroid. The story might be that a human colony living in an asteroid belt (maybe they're miners, since there has been talk of mining the asteroids) has been invaded by an alien enemy. There could be a starfield screen sort of like Star Master, Star Raiders, or Star Voyager, and an asteroid map (not unlike the one for the cavern) that shows where the populated asteroids are, so you can pick your next destination and feed it into the nav computer. The starfield screen could just be a brief intermission, not necessarily a dogfight in space as in SM, SR, and SV-- just something between "levels" to help flesh out a story and put the cavern exploring in a larger context. And when you enter an asteroid, maybe the map could have flashing dots to indicate where the humans are, so you can see where you want to go, except you still need to figure out which tunnels to take to get there quickly and then get back out. There could also be enemy ships and natural asteroid-dwelling flying critters that you have to dodge or shoot-- I like Random Terrain's idea about how they only attack when the light zone reaches them, maybe waking them up and aggravating them.

 

Michael

[MausGames]

This is great; it shows a lot of potential! After I was flying around for a while, I thought, "It would be cool if there were a map you could pop up." When I came back to your post, I saw that there *is* a map-- just press SELECT. D'oh! What would be really nice, though, is if you could have the map show which locations you've already visited, such as displaying those locations in a different color. I know you're using the playfield to draw the map, but maybe you could use flickering for the map screen. By flickering two background colors with two playfield colors, you can get four colors to draw with:

 

Even Frames (0, 2, 4, 6, etc.) = COLUBK_0, COLUPF_0

Odd Frames (1, 3, 5, 7, etc.) = COLUBK_1, COLUPF_1

 

Color 0 = COLUBK_0 and COLUBK_1 flickered together

Color 1 = COLUBK_0 and COLUPF_1 flickered together

Color 2 = COLUPF_0 and COLUBK_1 flickered together

Color 3 = COLUPF_0 and COLUPF_1 flickered together

 

Anyway, what you've got is great. The cavern looks really cool-- it has a "natural" appearance to it-- and I love the way the playfield color gets brighter/darker, following you around as you descend and ascend.

 

Where to go with this? One idea might be a rescue game, where you have to find your way through the cavern, locate, and save (pick up) people who are trapped in the cavern. Or maybe the cavern serves as an underground enemy base, and you must blast your way through the enemy's defenses, seek out, and destroy all of their weapons depots, or command centers, or whatnot.

 

Michael

 

Your ideas for the map screen are great, but I couldn't think of any good way to create a on/off flag for each and every chamber.

I think a combination of your other ideas would be great; rescuing people, fighting enemies, and destroying bases. I put in the lighting to help a little with the blandness of the playfields, and I figured different areas could have different colors, a la Metroid, my all-time favorite explore strange dark places for hours game.

 

Since this would be compared to H.E.R.O., you might want to stick to a treasure hunt of some kind. Hopefully, randomly placed treasure. Since you have a lighting effect, maybe there could be randomly placed cave creatures that you can only see within the strip that is lit up. They might ignore you outside of the band of light, but once inside, they might attack and you'll have to be quick and shoot them or move out of the way so they'll be in the dark again.

 

That's a great idea, I love good enemy AI. I'll Definitely use that, and don't worry I want plenty of randomness.

 

Really awesome! It made me think of being underwater, the way the ship sinks slowly. If it is meant to be underwater, some underwater enemies might be cool. If not then may need to have acceleration downward to better mimic higher gravity? It might be good to use acceleration overall to make movement a little more realistic, but that might make it too hard to navigate the cave quickly (so may need to move/accelerate slowly). The caves are really nice!

 

I also thought it was fun to see how deep I could go. Maybe it could be either a deep sea dive or journey to the center of the earth type of thing. Either way, maybe as you get closer to the center of the earth, maybe the walls get hot(?) and you lose life/energy by touching them? Level completion by finding a base or treasure might be good.

 

This is meant to be on a low gravity planet, and I am still trying to decide if I want acceleration for the ship. I think I do, to add to the challenge, as long as it's not too aggravating. I was thinking each level would have a few areas stacked on top of each other, which must be navigated to the end, and then in reverse to get back out to the surface. I may or may not have surface levels, because I really like seagtgruff's ideas about asteroids.

 

Hi Maus

You want suggestions?What about some enemies in the game?Maybe some keys,to open special areas????

Or some power ups????You could do so much with this.....Hope to see more.

greetings Walter

 

Thanks for the ideas, I hope to add all three in there eventually.

 

It made me think of being underwater, the way the ship sinks slowly.

What with the ship being a spaceship (or it looks like one to me), the slow-falling reminded me of the low gravity of a small planetoid or asteroid. The story might be that a human colony living in an asteroid belt (maybe they're miners, since there has been talk of mining the asteroids) has been invaded by an alien enemy. There could be a starfield screen sort of like Star Master, Star Raiders, or Star Voyager, and an asteroid map (not unlike the one for the cavern) that shows where the populated asteroids are, so you can pick your next destination and feed it into the nav computer. The starfield screen could just be a brief intermission, not necessarily a dogfight in space as in SM, SR, and SV-- just something between "levels" to help flesh out a story and put the cavern exploring in a larger context. And when you enter an asteroid, maybe the map could have flashing dots to indicate where the humans are, so you can see where you want to go, except you still need to figure out which tunnels to take to get there quickly and then get back out. There could also be enemy ships and natural asteroid-dwelling flying critters that you have to dodge or shoot-- I like Random Terrain's idea about how they only attack when the light zone reaches them, maybe waking them up and aggravating them.

 

Michael

 

That all sounds really good, and really complicated. I badly need a team! I like the idea of indicators on the map screens. The one map screen there is now was kind of slopped together and I haven't tested any sort of visited/not visited, indicators, or anything else. If you saw how disgusting my code is you wouldn't think it was possible to add anything to it. I'm going over on cycles during some screen transitions in the game, and I have no idea how to optimize the code. I should send it to you so you can see how insane my coding style is. I didn't use your "move around rooms" example, because I could never wrap my head around it. My game uses a single variable & table, and adds/subtracts 1 for horizontal room change and adds/subtracts 10 for vertical room change.

 

Oh yeah, I also really like your idea of multiple destinations that can be played in any order.

 

I shelved this project a while back out of respect for AM's Cave In, but they've become quite different games (his being considerably better). Now that he's done I'm ready to have another go at it.

 

Maybe this game would be a good candidate for a group project? I'll go ahead and post the disturbingly horrible source code. Beware though, it's highly toxic stuff. I'm always wondering why it seems like I never have enough time to get anything done, and then I go back to my giant pile of bB source code and it's obvious. Just look how much typing went into this, and it was just a quick random thing I threw together. Luckily I can watch tv and type at the same time...which probably explains a lot...ZETA1a.bas

Edited December 25, 2007 by MausGames

[SeaGtGruff]

Maybe this game would be a good candidate for a group project? I'll go ahead and post the disturbingly horrible source code.

I think "Combat DX" and "ZETA" are both good candidates for group projects. Thank you for posting the code.

 

For a group project to work, there should be a project leader who keeps things organized. Since ZETA is your code, you are the natural candidate.

 

Michael

[tschak909]

How much ROM space do you have left? you could probably store a precalculated table of states in rom, and have an offset pointer for every two rows or something? Basically try to use the rom space to your advantage...

 

-Thom

 

This is great; it shows a lot of potential! After I was flying around for a while, I thought, "It would be cool if there were a map you could pop up." When I came back to your post, I saw that there *is* a map-- just press SELECT. D'oh! What would be really nice, though, is if you could have the map show which locations you've already visited, such as displaying those locations in a different color. I know you're using the playfield to draw the map, but maybe you could use flickering for the map screen. By flickering two background colors with two playfield colors, you can get four colors to draw with:

 

Even Frames (0, 2, 4, 6, etc.) = COLUBK_0, COLUPF_0

Odd Frames (1, 3, 5, 7, etc.) = COLUBK_1, COLUPF_1

 

Color 0 = COLUBK_0 and COLUBK_1 flickered together

Color 1 = COLUBK_0 and COLUPF_1 flickered together

Color 2 = COLUPF_0 and COLUBK_1 flickered together

Color 3 = COLUPF_0 and COLUPF_1 flickered together

 

Anyway, what you've got is great. The cavern looks really cool-- it has a "natural" appearance to it-- and I love the way the playfield color gets brighter/darker, following you around as you descend and ascend.

 

Where to go with this? One idea might be a rescue game, where you have to find your way through the cavern, locate, and save (pick up) people who are trapped in the cavern. Or maybe the cavern serves as an underground enemy base, and you must blast your way through the enemy's defenses, seek out, and destroy all of their weapons depots, or command centers, or whatnot.

 

Michael

 

Your ideas for the map screen are great, but I couldn't think of any good way to create a on/off flag for each and every chamber.

I think a combination of your other ideas would be great; rescuing people, fighting enemies, and destroying bases. I put in the lighting to help a little with the blandness of the playfields, and I figured different areas could have different colors, a la Metroid, my all-time favorite explore strange dark places for hours game.

 

Since this would be compared to H.E.R.O., you might want to stick to a treasure hunt of some kind. Hopefully, randomly placed treasure. Since you have a lighting effect, maybe there could be randomly placed cave creatures that you can only see within the strip that is lit up. They might ignore you outside of the band of light, but once inside, they might attack and you'll have to be quick and shoot them or move out of the way so they'll be in the dark again.

 

That's a great idea, I love good enemy AI. I'll Definitely use that, and don't worry I want plenty of randomness.

 

Really awesome! It made me think of being underwater, the way the ship sinks slowly. If it is meant to be underwater, some underwater enemies might be cool. If not then may need to have acceleration downward to better mimic higher gravity? It might be good to use acceleration overall to make movement a little more realistic, but that might make it too hard to navigate the cave quickly (so may need to move/accelerate slowly). The caves are really nice!

 

I also thought it was fun to see how deep I could go. Maybe it could be either a deep sea dive or journey to the center of the earth type of thing. Either way, maybe as you get closer to the center of the earth, maybe the walls get hot(?) and you lose life/energy by touching them? Level completion by finding a base or treasure might be good.

 

This is meant to be on a low gravity planet, and I am still trying to decide if I want acceleration for the ship. I think I do, to add to the challenge, as long as it's not too aggravating. I was thinking each level would have a few areas stacked on top of each other, which must be navigated to the end, and then in reverse to get back out to the surface. I may or may not have surface levels, because I really like seagtgruff's ideas about asteroids.

 

Hi Maus

You want suggestions?What about some enemies in the game?Maybe some keys,to open special areas????

Or some power ups????You could do so much with this.....Hope to see more.

greetings Walter

 

Thanks for the ideas, I hope to add all three in there eventually.

 

It made me think of being underwater, the way the ship sinks slowly.

What with the ship being a spaceship (or it looks like one to me), the slow-falling reminded me of the low gravity of a small planetoid or asteroid. The story might be that a human colony living in an asteroid belt (maybe they're miners, since there has been talk of mining the asteroids) has been invaded by an alien enemy. There could be a starfield screen sort of like Star Master, Star Raiders, or Star Voyager, and an asteroid map (not unlike the one for the cavern) that shows where the populated asteroids are, so you can pick your next destination and feed it into the nav computer. The starfield screen could just be a brief intermission, not necessarily a dogfight in space as in SM, SR, and SV-- just something between "levels" to help flesh out a story and put the cavern exploring in a larger context. And when you enter an asteroid, maybe the map could have flashing dots to indicate where the humans are, so you can see where you want to go, except you still need to figure out which tunnels to take to get there quickly and then get back out. There could also be enemy ships and natural asteroid-dwelling flying critters that you have to dodge or shoot-- I like Random Terrain's idea about how they only attack when the light zone reaches them, maybe waking them up and aggravating them.

 

Michael

 

That all sounds really good, and really complicated. I badly need a team! I like the idea of indicators on the map screens. The one map screen there is now was kind of slopped together and I haven't tested any sort of visited/not visited, indicators, or anything else. If you saw how disgusting my code is you wouldn't think it was possible to add anything to it. I'm going over on cycles during some screen transitions in the game, and I have no idea how to optimize the code. I should send it to you so you can see how insane my coding style is. I didn't use your "move around rooms" example, because I could never wrap my head around it. My game uses a single variable & table, and adds/subtracts 1 for horizontal room change and adds/subtracts 10 for vertical room change.

 

Oh yeah, I also really like your idea of multiple destinations that can be played in any order.

 

I shelved this project a while back out of respect for AM's Cave In, but they've become quite different games (his being considerably better). Now that he's done I'm ready to have another go at it.

 

Maybe this game would be a good candidate for a group project? I'll go ahead and post the disturbingly horrible source code. Beware though, it's highly toxic stuff. I'm always wondering why it seems like I never have enough time to get anything done, and then I go back to my giant pile of bB source code and it's obvious. Just look how much typing went into this, and it was just a quick random thing I threw together. Luckily I can watch tv and type at the same time...which probably explains a lot...ZETA1a.bas

[SeaGtGruff]

I went through the ZETA code and optimized it in a few places to save some ROM. The original code is remarked out, and is followed by the updated code, to help you better see what was changed. I also found a slight timing bug in bB's standard kernel (see the Bug Thread for details). The revised ZETA code is attached below. I imagine there are probably other ways it could be optimized, but this is a start. I also remarked out the debug option to show the cycles in the score. Oh, and I made a change in the ball's horizontal position, which I'm not sure about-- the change will keep the ball in the same spot in relation to the ship as the ship faces left and right, but I'm not sure if I did it the way it was intended, and I didn't realize at the time that pressing fire will "drop" the ball.

 

Michael

ZETA1a1.zip

[SeaGtGruff]

By the way, I just realized that the modified score graphics file wasn't posted, so the .bin I just posted has the standard score graphics.

 

Michael

[MausGames]

Thanks, it is useful to see how code can be optimized. I'm not good at that. The best I usually hope for is something that will compile. Your version has broken ball, it's meant to be a weapon. I'm not sure what happened there.

 

I dont know if anyone is interested in contributing to this, but if so the playfield graphics could definately be redesigned and maps are 10x10. Also the sprite kind of sucks. You can also use any gradient for the playfield, I just chose brown.

Edited January 1, 2008 by MausGames

[Piggles]

I like this one a lot. It reminds me of Cybernoid or Solar Jetman for the NES.

Edited February 8, 2008 by Piggles

[yuppicide]

I was looking around for something I can do with a title screen in one of my games and just noticed this and it looks GREAT. Good work!

[STGuy1040]

Why hasn't this been finished yet? This is downright awesome!

[MausGames]

Most of the games I've posted have never been finished, or have been accidentally lost or destroyed. The ones that have been finished haven't been released for various reasons. I'm too lazy to design two sets of levels, obstacles, and goals just to demo the game early, so I won't be releasing this bin until harmony carts are finished. First I'd also like to check out all possibilities for expanded levels and game text with the SD slot. It would be cool to be able to release new missions later, on SD. I don't know yet if that will be possible, or something I would be able to even learn how to manage. We'll see; what exactly did you like about this game? There isn't a lot to the demo I posted.