Get Lost!

[+Propane13]

I honestly do not think that he is going to change any of the areas now...its mostly clean up and add sound...just my humble opinion

 

I'm at about that same point for now; but, yeah it may make sense to wait just in case I have to redesign a section.

It's a low probability, but it could happen. I'll leave it up to Mord though; I wouldn't want him to waste his time.

But, the levels are pretty much what I would call beta-stage. Unless there's a major problem, they're staying this way for now.

 

-John

[+Propane13]

As far as my testing can tell, the fix is in place for the "floating issue" that I introduced in the last release.

This also solves a couple of other boundary-checking cases in code near to what GroovyBee found an issue with (thanks GroovyBee!).

 

Here they are; the black screen and the "brown bar freeze" issues are still at large, but at least people can continue gameplay without their character doing weird things.

 

getlost.bin

getlost.a78

 

Enjoy!

 

-John

[kyle]

I would like one on cart also

[+Propane13]

I'm curious... Are the problems reproducible on that last build?

 

I did some code checks and there is a small possibility that one of the breakages that I fixed in that last build could have caused a situation of unpredictable behavior. It is a small possibility, but I thought I would check to see if I got a magic fix.

 

Doubtful, but you never know....

 

-John

[KevinMos3]

Sorry for the delay, but I won't have more time to spend testing until this weekend.

Hopefully the other people testing will be available.

[NIKON]

It may not mean much to anyone else here.. but this is an accomplishment to me...for the longest time I wondered how to get this loot..

 

[+Propane13]

Congrats! Sometimes the most visible gem has a very indirect path to it.

 

-John

[+Propane13]

Secret feature time.

 

Based on the fact that some people have played for hours and not yet beaten the game, I wanted to see about making some sort of feature where 3 games could be saved/loaded into NVRAM (think Legend of Zelda saved games). Even I take about an hour to finish the game; I would hate to have people have to start over each time.

 

I have an example of the Save/Load code here:

getlost.a78

getlost.bin

However, the emulators / CC2 / current boards don't have support at the moment.

So, it just saves to RAM, and when you power off, it's gone.

That means this is kind of a proof-of-concept for now.

 

Here's a screenshot:

 

I'm starting to run low on ROM space, so this version caused me to sacrifice my debugger mode.

If I'm lucky, and the black screen / freeze issue went away (I am hoping I am lucky, but still not sure), then the debugger mode isn't really needed at this time anyway. But, I can always disable the loader screen temporarily if I need to do some debugging if it's still there.

 

So, currently, data is saved when you:

- die

- get a gem

- hit a new checkpoint

 

My limited hardware background suggests that I shouldn't write to battery-backed SRAM or NVRAM too often (I don't know why, but I think I remember hearing that this was a bad practice in the old days), but maybe that has changed. A hardware expert can correct me if I'm mistaken about that. If it's no big deal, I'd like to have it dump the time data every second, to keep that data too. I'll defer that decision if / once there's hardware available.

 

I also may add a confirmation question for deleting saved-data; since this is proof-of-concept at the moment, I haven't added that yet.

 

Anyway, feel free to try it out; let me know if it works on real hardware. When you hit reset, you go back to the loading screen, and can try different files and destroy them at your leisure.

 

Oh, and reset is the only way to get to the loading screen; I disabled push-button support since you need that specifically on the Loading Screen, and I didn't want people accidentally zipping through that screen or doing something incorrect. Similarly, to exit the loading screen, the fire button is the only way (reset is ineffective). I think it works ok this way.

 

The hardware requirements for this are just 153 bytes; so I am hopeful that it may be somehow doable in the future.

 

Also, please let me know if anyone sees any freezes / black screens on this ROM or the previous ROM I posted-- if it does happen, and you're using the previous ROM, please see if you can put it in debugger mode by pressing the second controller's button-- if you can, please follow instructions a few posts before that so I can try to learn what happened.

 

Thanks everyone for your time and dedication.

 

-John

[+Propane13]

Quick patch-- if you hit reset and sound is playing, it would play indefinitely on the loading screen.

That's solved.

 

getlost.a78

getlost.bin

 

-John

[kenfused]

Based on the fact that some people have played for hours and not yet beaten the game, I wanted to see about making some sort of feature where 3 games could be saved/loaded into NVRAM (think Legend of Zelda saved games).

Depending on how much data you need to save you could potentially use a savekey/atarvox to save data. I don't know about the availability of savekeys but they were probably cheap enough you could devote one to the game and maybe include it with the cart. Or if you are doing your own cart board, put a serial eeprom, eeprom, or nvram (as you mentioned) on the cart.

[NIKON]

I have a suggestion...but first let me just say that I have zero programming experience on the 7800....

 

Given the mechanics of this game..why not give the save option to the player?

 

I would say when the player hits a new checkpoint from the current one, then give the player the option to save then.

Edited February 3, 2013 by NIKON

[+Propane13]

That is also very possible.

 

-John

[KevinMos3]

I found an area I haven't been before... cloud hopping. Led me to something very VERY cool.

 

 

edit: Got the black screen just now. I noticed something I hadn't before... not too long before I got the black screen, I started seeing a little bit of snow appear when I would make a big jump. Like when I would go from one screen to another. When I started seeing this, I suspected it would lock up soon, and then it did. This time, it blacked out when I was in the upper-right area of the map (around where the big pair of ladders are that take you to the clouds.

Edited February 3, 2013 by KevinMos3

[NIKON]

I found an area I haven't been before... cloud hopping. Led me to something very VERY cool.

 

 

edit: Got the black screen just now. I noticed something I hadn't before... not too long before I got the black screen, I started seeing a little bit of snow appear when I would make a big jump. Like when I would go from one screen to another. When I started seeing this, I suspected it would lock up soon, and then it did. This time, it blacked out when I was in the upper-right area of the map (around where the big pair of ladders are that take you to the clouds.

 

where is this cloud area..and how can I get to it.. PM me

[Atarifever]

I found an area I haven't been before... cloud hopping. Led me to something very VERY cool.

 

 

edit: Got the black screen just now. I noticed something I hadn't before... not too long before I got the black screen, I started seeing a little bit of snow appear when I would make a big jump. Like when I would go from one screen to another. When I started seeing this, I suspected it would lock up soon, and then it did. This time, it blacked out when I was in the upper-right area of the map (around where the big pair of ladders are that take you to the clouds.

 

I misread the tone of the edit, and right up until "I suspected it would lock up soon..." I thought you were going to say you found a new "ice world" area. Wrong kind of snow.

[Jaynz]

Hmm... easier option, and more keeping with the time-frame of the 7800s catalog, is to have a 'level password' which can be entered in from the game's menu screen. Clear a level, you get a new password. (The password is basically an alpanumeric containing any key information required for your save points). For instance "UACCE" could be level 1, save point 3, 5 lives, etc. I used to write tones of these little algorithms back in the day - very efficient way to do it if you don't really need a lot of data for the save game.

[KevinMos3]

Might be hard to do that with this game though. It's not "level" oriented and you'd need to account for time played, deaths, x/y coords, and probably the biggest hurdle... locations of all loot collected.

 

This might be a stupid question, but would it be possible to wire up an eeprom to handle saving?

[Jaynz]

Might be hard to do that with this game though. It's not "level" oriented and you'd need to account for time played, deaths, x/y coords, and probably the biggest hurdle... locations of all loot collected.

 

The first three are relatively easy (particularly since the password gen would rely on 'checkpoints' at the game over state). The last one kinda depends on the number of loot items around. How many are there and are they static? If they're not moving or not randomized, it may be a little easier to implement.

If someone can post the data required directly, I can do a little C-based pseudo-code to show what I mean.

[+Propane13]

Hello!

 

A password is a great idea, and I've thought about it a bit.

 

Unfortunately, for this game, there are 2 problems that make a password impractical:

- it's about 60 bytes that need to be saved per game. That would shape up to be a substantial password.

- I'd have to put in more graphics space for password characters. As it stands, I'm pretty packed in that area (almost all of the 32K is at capacity).

 

With a save-game feature, I need minimal screen-space, and it's easy enough to hook in.

I think the hardware support could be there, and it'd make the game unique; that's why I'm looking at that path at the moment.

 

Regards,

-John

[+Propane13]

So, I played this last night on my newly acquired Cuttle Cart 2.

 

Things I noticed:

- it's really quiet with no music and limited sound effects

- the game restarted itself back to the initial screen one time at 25 minutes

- the game froze at 7 minutes, 16 seconds, and the bat WAS on screen.

 

I may start pulling pieces of code out of my mainloop and putting them back since I can now debug on real hardware at home.

 

I have a few questions for those interested in the completion of this game:

- what sound effects should there be?

 

Possible options include:

- sound on death

- sound on respawn after death

- sound on jump

- sound on falling a great distance

- sound on underwater jump

- sound in background while underwater

- sound of feet moving when running

- any others?

 

I know that some of these options would be distracting from gameplay, so I want to be careful what I add and what I don't.

 

Curious for feedback in this area.

 

-John

[Jaynz]

Unfortunately, for this game, there are 2 problems that make a password impractical:

- it's about 60 bytes that need to be saved per game. That would shape up to be a substantial password.

- I'd have to put in more graphics space for password characters. As it stands, I'm pretty packed in that area (almost all of the 32K is at capacity).

 

Very roughly, I come up to about 13 or 14 characters needed for the entire 60 byte string, using only Alphanumerics. The question of space is really the breakdown/rebuild of the code into usable game data. Again, I can't comment too much farther without seeing the actual structure. (I should look at the game itself again tonight for further thoughts on this.)

 

The password characters themselves need not be unique - just reuse the text and numbers already in the game.

 

I think the hardware support could be there, and it'd make the game unique; that's why I'm looking at that path at the moment.

Well, the battery backup idea is timely, though you're looking at a whole new card design for the 7800 to do that. Making it an XM option may be possible, depending on how they handle the high-score data stuff.

[NIKON]

So, I played this last night on my newly acquired Cuttle Cart 2.

 

Things I noticed:

- it's really quiet with no music and limited sound effects

- the game restarted itself back to the initial screen one time at 25 minutes

- the game froze at 7 minutes, 16 seconds, and the bat WAS on screen.

 

I may start pulling pieces of code out of my mainloop and putting them back since I can now debug on real hardware at home.

 

I have a few questions for those interested in the completion of this game:

- what sound effects should there be?

 

Possible options include:

- sound on death

- sound on respawn after death

- sound on jump

- sound on falling a great distance

- sound on underwater jump

- sound in background while underwater

- sound of feet moving when running

- any others?

 

I know that some of these options would be distracting from gameplay, so I want to be careful what I add and what I don't.

 

Curious for feedback in this area.

 

-John

 

Feet movement would be nice...but could become repetitive

 

any kind of falling or ascent would need to be in there...this could be based on the Y coordinance

 

death .. a short buzz type sound..nothing to long since deaths are going to be very frequent

 

respawn ..a bell type sound

 

as far as background sounds...think the arcade version of dig dug...the background music does not play unless your character is moving

 

jumping .. think mario bros type jumping sound..or possibly a 2600 game jumping sound

 

all this is nice but I thought that i read in one of your prior posts that you were running out of rom space...unless you are planning on expanding this game on to a larger rom.. how would you put more sound in the program?

[KevinMos3]

- it's really quiet with no music and limited sound effects

- what sound effects should there be?

 

I've thought about this quite a bit. Sounds will greatly add to the feel of the game. I'm reminded of how Thomas said he thought Boulder Dash played good, but once sound effectst were added in, it completely changed the feel of the game (in a good way). I'm paraphrasing of course.

 

One sound that I've thought of that I don't see mentioned is a rhythmic fire sound timed with the blasts. It would also help with timing your movements since both your eyes and ears would be involved. Fire blasts are all over the place in this game and the TIA sound can do a pretty good fire effect. I'm thinking Dragonfire for the 2600 might be a good example, but I'll need to review.

 

I've also thought about a jump sound. In some ways, the Pitfall sound would be fitting (you know what I'm talking about) , but it's a little too overpowering for this environment so it would need changed up a bit to be "lighter". There's so much jumping that maybe a shorter simpler sound would be better.

 

I like all the other ideas you've put forth, footsteps, long-falls, etc. As long as the sounds aren't too overpowering (loud), I think you'll be fine adding quite a few. I think the game will feel a lot more solid too, once you have them added in. I bet the graphics will even "appear" to look better, just because of the way more senses will be involved.

Edited February 6, 2013 by KevinMos3

[Jaynz]

You could start with the Pitfall "jump" and "die" sounds.. see how it fits and go from there. Steps my be a little much ...

[NIKON]

Still playing this game...anyone else???

 

are there any updates that can be had...even small ones would be nice