Tumulus (2600)

[yllawwally]

Tumulus_1.bin You are an adventurer, out to stop the fiends coming from Tumulus. This game is inspired by Golden Axe. It's currently a WIP. Music is by Der Luchs. I've been working on it, for a long long time. I think finally nice enough to let others have a peak. It has a long way to go still.

 

Here is the most recent version. Tumulus_39.bin

Tumulus_38.bin

Tumulus_37.bin

Tumulus_36.bin

Tumulus_35.bin

Tumulus_34.bin
Tumulus_33.bin
Tumulus_32.bin

Edited March 19, 2015 by yllawwally

[Rabbit 2600]

Screenshots please =)

[yllawwally]

Here's a screenshot. The bin is in the first post.

[Rabbit 2600]

That's pretty cool! We need more fighting games for the Atari 2600! Can't wait for the next update! I'm curious, how did you fix the multiple sprites hit detection?

[yllawwally]

I save the collision data, and then clear it, before I display each sprite. I load it twice right now. So I can differentiate between the pits and the sprites. I'm not sure where to find enough cycle to read the other collision registers. It would be nice if you could load 2 registers that contained all the collision data, since it's only 15 bits of data.

[yllawwally]

Tumulus_2.binHere's a new version. Fixed scrolling. Was using too many cycles. Changing internal memory structure, to make enemies selectable. Now only allows a palette of 12 possible color schemes for enemies. However since there will probably never be that many, it's a good trade off. Saves 12 bytes of Ram, and also saves some cycles in the kernel.

[Rabbit 2600]

Nice! =D

 

How did you make the music by the way? I've just learned how to make sound effects =)

[yllawwally]

Der Luchs made the music with the batari keyboard. It's great music isn't it. Then he gave me the note output. I put that into a data table. I was able to compress it because the note durations, audio tone, and audio volume where all the same. Also the my code is at http://atariage.com/forums/topic/210937-a2600-music/page__st__75?do=findComment&comment=2759611. I changed it a little to do the compressions, and allow for a 255 note song. If you interested I'll put the new code here, for asm.

[yllawwally]

Tumulus_3.binI've added the ability to get on a horse, and get knocked of the horse now.

Bugs:

The main player gets graphics corruption, when too far to the right.

My line count goes to 263 every third screen.(I suspect movement calculations go over)

Shouldn't get knocked off horse when hitting pits.

 

Future Add Ons

Implement damage to player. Health bar system.

Finish Score Display

Pause screen, before primary enemies go too far left.

 

Wish List

Have enemies throw weapons.

[yllawwally]

Tumulus_4.bin

Preliminary Scoring Added

BUG : Sword does not always appear.

 

Should I use 2 button genesis controls, or make it use only one button. Does anyone have an opinion on this?

[yllawwally]

Tumulus_5.bin5 digit scoring is now complete. Changing hit detection, to allow enemies to have Hit Points. Pony can now be in any slot. Have not looked at the sword not always appearing issue. Trying to find the cycles to change Sizing based on enemy type.

[yllawwally]

Minor fixes to color problems. More efficient code. I was using lda and then tax, converted those to lax, for graphics loading. No rom to upload today, the fixes wouldn't be very noticeable.

[Der Luchs]

The horse (hopefully it is one ^^) is great, didn't get it before ^^

[yllawwally]

Yes, it's a horse. I need to go through and make new graphics. But that has been low in priority so far. I still need to add a few more enemies, and potions or scrolls for clearing the screen. I had hoped to make a second level. However, I won't have enough rom space. I want to make this a 4k game. I'm getting very tight with space. Every time I add a few lines of code, I have to compress code in other spots. However there is some free space around the graphics, that I can weave some code through.

[yllawwally]

Tumulus_6.binI improved the scoring. Player Health is now implemented. Started adding indicator for potions. Added some new enemies. Screen now pauses, when there are enemies that must be killed to proceed. I am considering adding an extra enemy if the player takes to long to dispatch bad guys. A flash is now shown if the enemy is hit. Different enemies have different hit points, and different score values. Most of the portions for using and getting potions remain to be added. The player has graphical glitches. The enemies have a glitch where they are recolored when too far to the right. I don't seem to have enough cycles to fix it. Sometimes the player will gain points by sitting on the lowest pit. For some reason this pit is killed by sitting on it, and awards points, but doesn't disappear.

[TrekMD]

Somehow I had missed this. I will definitely give this latest version a try. Thanks!

[yllawwally]

Have you gotten your music to work in your game, yet?

Nice! =D

 

How did you make the music by the way? I've just learned how to make sound effects =)

[Rabbit 2600]

Not quite yet. I'm still fiddling with the codes. Sometimes I can get it to work, kind off. I can make it work in the titlescreen, but anywhere else it just get scrambled.

[yllawwally]

Rabbit 2600, do you have you're source posted?

[yllawwally]

Tumulus_8.binSomehow I had forgotten to add a way to disable the pits. I could move them, but not hide them. That is now fixed. It seems somehow the sitting on the bottom pit issue got fixed. However I don't know why it no longer allows unlimited points??? It seems that sometimes you lose the horse, for no apparent reason. Perhaps ghosts? One enemy seems to pick the wrong palette for some reason. Pushed a bunch of code into the graphic space. So now I have about 200 bytes, more to work with. I can probably get another 200 bytes later by pushing more into the graphics. Level design is just starting. I can specify when enemies appear, and on which level. The enemies have different behaviors when you attack them. Next I want to adjust behaviors when you don't attack. If you attack a required enemy the screen will pause. This is needed to prevent the enemy being delayed and causing the next enemy to share that lane. I'm not sure if this is what I want or to allow the enemies to not leave the screen but allow new enemies up until that lane would want a new enemy. Would anyone out there have a preference for either behavior. Still no work on potions. But, they will be two parts. First a plant that is picked, then a mandrake will get out, and run away. Killing the mandrake will get you some potion. The roman numeral on the bottom is the amount of potion. Current hard coded to 2. This will max out at 5. I think using one will give 1 point of damage for each potion, you have, but only consume 1 point of the potion.

[yllawwally]

Tumulus_9.binPotion counter is now active. However no way to use or collect them yet. I think i got the horse fixed so that you don't lose him immediately. Also should not get hurt touching any of the pits. Although those are disabled in this version. Lots of moving code around. I had increased the calculations significantly. Which added 5 more lines to each screen, which I didn't notice. Stella still displayed fine. Probably would have rolled on a real TV. Got that fixed now. Used significantly more illegal opcodes. Worked on scoring. I think it's fixed now. Player still gets corrupted, sometimes. Also sometimes the weapon flashes on and off, depending on where you're standing. Moved the code into the graphics area, to make use of left over space now have, 400 bytes left. However 200 of that will be used for enemy lists. Still need to add about 8 more enemy types. Mostly level end monsters. Which will eat up at least another 200 bytes alone. So really don't have much space left. May need to be creative with level data. Might be able to squeeze out 100 bytes, by forcing the amount of time between monsters or which lane they must appear at. I'm hoping there will be 5 levels., each with a boss. I'm not sure how I'm going to handle these. Might need to fool with the kernel, to allow it to let the monster leave their lanes. Not sure if there's an easy way to do with with the amount of ROM I have left to work with.

[yllawwally]

Tumulus_10.binI just realized I can edit my first post. So I will place the most current version there as well. So people can find it easily. Fixed the man getting crushed. Something was wrong with the code for switching to the attack pics. Not sure what was wrong, but it now works. Added eyes to the sky when paused. This will eventually use a delay, and then attack the player for taking too long. Mountains get messed up, probably timing issue, in those lines. I think I'm updating to early in the middle of the line. Mandrakes now exist and will convert when hit. Although the pics are in reverse. And they don't grant life or magic yet. Now pits move too quickly. I suspect this is related to speeding up the game when on the horse. Still player and enemy graphical glitches. Trying to determine what bosses will be like. The only difference between levels will probably be color. There is just not enough ROM to change the levels significantly. If anyone likes this game when it's done, maybe a part 2 will be made with larger ROM space.

[yllawwally]

Fixed the pictures for the mandrake. Now they award both health and potions. Compressed audio a little mode, got 80 bytes. Scoring is a little messed up, because some of the new enemies give more than 10 points. Changing how I store level data. At the moment I use 160 bytes. But with the current scheme, I would need 300. The new version will use 200 total. I'm trying to compress more, but I'm not sure that is feasible. This will put a hard limit of 30 different monsters.

[yllawwally]

Tumulus_11.binI needed to add an RNG generator, for when you take too long to kill the enemy onscreen. An earthquake occurs, and pits will open in the ground. I'm using galois generator, and reseed it from the rolling counter whenever it returns 0. The countdown for the eyes begins as soon as an enemy appears. I need to fix it, to only when the enemy would leave the screen or the player interacts with it. Desperately out of ROM space. Some of the player corruption has been fixed. There seems to be the ghosts dead enemies that can kill the player. A single pixel goes across the screen sometimes. The player sword is messed up a little, on the left edge. The player graphics are messed up a little on the right edge. Killing enemies seems to cause the screen to jump. Haven't implemented using magic yet. Been tightening up the code a little. using bne/beq after a lda, instead of cmp. Once again I messed up the mountains a little. Adjust player sprite accidentally overlapped with horse. So that the sword became black. However this is way easier to see the knife. Edited June 28, 2013 by yllawwally

[yllawwally]

I just played this on my TV last night. OMG, it's awful. The screen is jittery. The colors aren't good. The main player is bad, it's hard to describe. He changes size. Becomes a 2 pixel tall block. Shifts colors. It's a little harder to figure out what going on. Stella is a really good simulator. However it seems to mask these problems. On stella, colors are vibrant, the player and monsters look good. I tested on a 7800,with an LED tv. The colors may be because of the TV connection. I had not tried it on a real machine in many months. It looked good before. I've changed something, that makes this into a pile of steaming #$%^. Luckily I have most of my revisions. I'll have to load them on a harmony cart, and go through them and figure when the graphics got broken. Hopefully it's something I can easily revert back to. I suspect I broke the graphics in revision 85. Which is when I switched from 5 enemies to 8. I've considered going back to 5. If anyone has an opinion on this, feel free to speak up. For a point of reference, Version 11 here is revision 129. And I'm currently using 132.