(Coleco) Something Fishy

[Tursi]

I found another old source code disk, and so I went ahead and ported a second old TI game of mine to the Coleco. It's titled "Waterville Rescue", but I'll be changing the name as that was originally based on an old kid's show in Canada.

 

The game is a two player horizontal shooter, loosely, set in an aquatic environment. There's no selection of players or anything, you hit fire and the two of you are off. Dodge or shoot enemies, and try to make it to the end of the single rather long level, where you'll face an overly difficult boss battle.

 

With most of the support code already written for Super Space Acer, this only took a few hours of bugfixing, and a couple new routines for text, to get up and running. There is less I want to do here, it won't see a complete overhaul like Acer will, but there are a few things at least that need to be done better than they are before considering it complete.

 

If you're curious, it's located at http://www.harmlesslion.com/cgi-bin/onesoft.cgi?67 (with a couple of screenshots).

[Pixelboy]

I downloaded it but haven't tried it yet. For now, I would just like to make a suggestion (which also applies to Super Space Acer): When posting new versions of your software, there should be a version number included in the ROM's filename. Either a number corresponding to the date of release, or a more "classic" version number. That way, people who collect these homebrew ROMs for archiving purposes (like me) can differentiate the versions. This same version number should appear on the web site too, by the way.

[Bruce Tomlin]

Even better is if you can include a version number and/or date near the beginning of your code so that it ends up in the binary.

[Tursi]

Sure, guys, I can drop identifications in there. I don't really consider them collectables in their current state, but it makes it easier to tell them apart.

[+thegoldenband]

From a user's perspective, when it comes to WIP versioning I like filenames ending with yyyy-mm-dd, as they sort properly and offer useful information as well. But "regular" version numbers are fine too.

 

As for the game, I haven't tried it much but it seems to play well, and it's a cute concept! It could use some sounds and music, which makes me wish I knew how to program tunes for the CV...

 

EDIT: Hmm, I suspect Mugrat isn't emulating this properly, as my dolphins are getting killed by invisible enemies in the fourth wave or so. Oh, wait a minute, the enemies are invisible because the background is black! I'm guessing this is an emulator bug.

 

EDIT #2: OK, the background is a proper blue in MESS. Boy, those falling spears/harpoons are nasty! I noticed some disappearing objects when they're on the same scanline, which is a little confusing. Do you plan to implement some kind of flicker/multiplexing for that?

Edited October 31, 2009 by thegoldenband

[Kurt_Woloch]

OK. I tested the game too (the Colecovision version, not the TI-99 one), and I'd like to propose some minor improvements:

 

1. Of course some sounds would be nice.

2. Since the enemies spawn in random positions, it happens that some of them disappear due to more than two of them being in the same scanline. Would it be doable to prevent this somehow, by never spawning more than two enemies in the same horizontal strip or something like that?

3. The waves end a bit suddenly for me, in that all the enemies that are on screen suddenly disappear, and then some new enemies come out. It would be better if there was some delay where no more enemies spawn and the ones on screen all fly through, and then, after all enemies of the old wave have disappeared, the next wave would begin. Or even better, leave the enemies of the old wave on screen when the new wave begins - but that of course would mean there are temporarily two different types of enemy on screen.

 

Otherwise, I find it pretty nice.

[Tursi]

Thanks guys. Yes, this is literally my first ever attempt at a full game in C, the first title I ever did that used sprites (excluding Extended BASIC things), and so it has a ton of little problems. I do hope to address the most serious of them!

 

The black screen does sound like an emulator bug, though I wonder why I triggered it. It shows blue in BlueMSX, which is where I do my testing (and of course on the TI, but the VDP access code is naturally different).

 

I do want to do something with sounds for sure, music is a little farther out of reach for me with my lack of musical ability, but we'll see. The sprite flicker is a necessity, yeah. I didn't put it in this first pass since this code directly hits VDP RAM for everything, and I like to use a shadow buffer to make flicker more straight-forward, so I need to update all that code.

 

The end of wave issue isn't too hard to overcome.. I believe I can pretty easily do either suggestion, but allowing the enemy types to mix onscreen isn't really a problem, I don't think (to be honest I can't remember why I did it the way I did... it was 20 years ago ). If the code doesn't allow for it then, yeah, I'll let the old ones scroll off before the new ones appear.

 

Thanks for the feedback, guys. I know the game isn't much, but it's nostalgia for me to see it up again.