atari2600land's Blog - Four Lives To Live

RSS Bot · April 24, 2018

I couldn't tear myself apart from working on the game again. So I added lives. And a life counter. So when you get hit, the burger crashes downwards and a life is subtracted once he hits bottom. So you get four lives to start with. I had a terrible time with this. Total time spent with lives: about 3 hours. My primary problem was the score was flickering once the burger hit bottom. But I moved the burger's final y position during crashing to onscreen and the flickering went away. So it isn't very pretty, but at least the score stopped flickering.

Another problem arose when I went to test the game on real hardware. The burger turned into a white flickering mess when it was falling down. I went back and added a "halt" to the death loop and that's all it took to solve that problem. I must remember to add "halt" to every loop I make in a Game Gear game.

Also, you can't pause the game when you die because there would be more than 8 sprites on one line if you did. As it is now, there are just 7 when the burger gets near the bottom, so no problem there. I plan to add a "game over" message when you die the final time. That's the next thing to work on. But I don't want it to say "Game Over" because that's too generic. Probably it would read "Zybort died." The hamburger's name is Zybort. I was working on the story for the instruction manual in case the game ever gets a proper release, which it probably won't, so I'll probably put it in a pdf file along with the game.

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