Elena's code blog - Office Intern game #2

RSS Bot · May 17, 2008

I decided to change the playfield to a symmetric board. Doing an asymmetric one was taking too many cycles and I doubt it would have worked with the plans I have for the sprites. I also tried testing alternating frames (30Hz flicker) but it was horrible so I scrapped that idea real fast. On the brighter side, I found a way to alternate the floor pattern in fewer cycles. (It's supposed to represent a hard wood floor.) It was 14 cycles before, now it's 9 cycles. I also decided to drop the analog clock. I may just go with a simple timer, a progress bar or a numeric timer.

I've noticed if you plan out the game board in horizontal regions, segregating the finer graphic details, you can achieve better results. Trying to accomplish everything on the same scanline just isn't feasible.

I'm still working on figuring out how to do the sprites so there aren't any in my current version. I did add a very primitive title screen though. I plan to decorate that with sprites, so the large O will be part of the title "Office Intern" or something like that.

If you're curious about development tools I'm using, I'm doing my work on an XP machine under a Cygwin shell. I've setup a makefile to compile my various assembly files and run a playfield processing script written in perl. Also, I edit my files with vim.

I will post again once I have working sprites, but not until then.

The latest screen shot and a binary. It doesn't do anything other than just render the title screen and playfield.

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