Another Galaga thread

[CrazyChris]

21 hours ago, Gimmee99 said:

Here is a new experimental build with these changes:

 

The high score is back and working.

The Galagish logo shows in the status bar when the game is "over" and in "insert coin" mode waiting for you to press start.

There is a fake level counter in the status bar now.  It actually only counts up to 20 levels, so if you make it to level 21, the level indicator will show garbage, but there you go.

I'm on vacation for the next two weeks, so hopefully nothing bad broken here ...

gish_June14.zip 26.83 kB · 106 downloads

Thank you for continuing to develop this!

[RetroDean66]

Fun game.  Great work. I'll be looking forward to future updates on this project!

 

[oky2000]

Looks great, sounds great.

[ALEXANDER]

On 6/15/2024 at 6:50 AM, Gimmee99 said:

Hey you made it to the garbage character levels !!!!

I already revamped the level counter and did it differently.  I don't want to use two digits because it crowds the screen too much and also affects the way the high school is updated if you use that blank digit between the garbage and the first 1 in your high score here.  So instead, I now have the counter going from 1 to 8 and cycling through the 4 colors.  So you have red level 1-8, then cyan level 1-8, then yellow level 1-8, then blue level 1-8.  Then after 32 levels, you would get the garbage chacters.  I might even change each color level to go from 0-9 which would give you 40 total levels before the garbage !!!

Now that there is a level tracker, I am also thinking about doing *something* depending on the level.  Maybe something easy to start with, like if you are on a level higher than 16, instead of 400 points for hitting a boss in motion, you get 800.  Or maybe after 16 levels, if you clear the level you get a new ship.  Let me know if you have any specific ideas that would be easy to "change" using the existing game assets.

And actually now that i think about it and see how good you are at the game with current difficulty, maybe when you get to level 16, I should start TAKING THINGS AWAY !!???  Like no more double ship, and no more extra lives !!!???

😛

 

Hi dear Gimmee99. i think you hav to do the same as the arcade original version. You can. Atari can ! Cheers.

[Gimmee99]

Ok, another round of experimentation on this project.  It bothered me that instead of having to do "something" to start the game, it just starts and you have to come out firing.  So I am totally ashamed of the inefficiency of the code, but I believe i have hacked in an "insert coin" screen that at least makes you press the start button to start the game.  What should happen is this:

 

When you load the game, you should get a starfield, ship, the galagish logo in the bottom left and "insert coin" in the bottom right. 

When you press Start the game should start.

When you run out of ships, you should get "game over" in the middle of the status bar.  Pressing start should take you back to the initial "insert coin" screen, and pressing start again will start a new game.

 

It would be cool if someone could at least try this and see if that is the experience you get.  I have only tested the A8 binary, so if someone has the right key mappings for the 5200, it would be nice to know that "start" is working for that build as well.

 

@playsoft If you want to show me some sample code of how to display a graphic in the top portion of the screen, I might be able to waste some more time and actually have a big bitmap of the logo at the insert coin screen.

gish_June29_2024.zip

[RB5200]

10 hours ago, Gimmee99 said:

would be cool if someone could at least try this and see if that is the experience you get.  I have only tested the A8 binary, so if someone has the right key mappings for the 5200, it would be nice to know that "start" is working for that build as well.

It does work the way your wanting on the OE machine, but the start button could use some debuf on it. The way it is right now from the game over screen a typical normal press of the start button will trigger twice just restarting the game, without seeing the insert coin screen. 

[Gimmee99]

Another interim experimental build.  I realized while testing today that since i added the concept of the insert coin experience and the game "starting over", the high score was not persisted across games.  I didn't think I could be more ashamed of the code behind the insert coin stuff, but I have surpassed that with a giant hack for maintaining the high score across games.  In my testing, it does work for games up to 99,990.  If you go to another digit, it might work (the code tries to do the right thing), but I do not have the patience to play until i get 100,000.  Changes here should be:

 

1. The insert coin text moved to center and the high score displayed on the right at the start screen.

2. New default high score is 10000 instead of 20,000 just to make it easier to test

3. The ship icon in the status bar is now blue, like the "L" for level indicator.  It seems better to me to have all the labels be blue.

4. The high score should be preserved between games

 

 

June30.zip

[RB5200]

6 hours ago, Gimmee99 said:

In my testing, it does work for games up to 99,990.  If you go to another digit, it might work (the code tries to do the right thing), but I do not have the patience to play until i get 100,000.  Changes here should be:

 

1. The insert coin text moved to center and the high score displayed on the right at the start screen.

2. New default high score is 10000 instead of 20,000 just to make it easier to test

3. The ship icon in the status bar is now blue, like the "L" for level indicator.  It seems better to me to have all the labels be blue.

4. The high score should be preserved between games

It does preserve over 100,000 and starting a new game, good job.

[+ZeroPage Homebrew]

ZeroPage Homebrew is playing Galagish on today's ZPH stream LIVE on Twitch! Hope you can join us!

 

Tue Jul 16, 2024 | LIVE @ 6PM PT | 9PM ET | 1AM GMT+1Day

WATCH LIVE: https://twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew/

WATCH LATER: https://youtube.com/zeropagehomebrew/

 

Games:

• Galagish (2024 WIP | A8) by Scott Bradley @Gimmee99 / Paul Lay @playsoft / Konstantinos Giamalidis @TIX (Graphics) / Bobby Clark @Synthpopalooza (Sound Effects)
• Sudotris (2024 Final | A8) by Paweł "Paw" Gugała / Krzysztof Ziembik @Kaz atarionline.pl / Zoltar-X (Music)
• Robots Rumble (2024 WIP | A8) by Tomasz Biela  @tebe (Code) / Miguetelo (Graphics) / Michał Szpilowski @miker (Music)

 

[Gimmee99]

Best of luck with this tonight. Sorry that I will miss but thanks much for the interest.  -Scott

[+ZeroPage Homebrew]

20 hours ago, Gimmee99 said:

Best of luck with this tonight. Sorry that I will miss but thanks much for the interest.  -Scott

 

Thank you for continuing to develop Galagish, we had fun playing it on the stream last night. Excellent graphics and sound and I hope the great work on it continues!

 

- James

[+playsoft]

On 7/16/2024 at 8:23 PM, ZeroPage Homebrew said:

• Galagish (2024 WIP | A8) by Scott Bradley @Gimmee99 / Paul Lay @playsoft / Bobby Clark @Synthpopalooza (Sound Effects)

And graphics by @TIX

[+ZeroPage Homebrew]

6 hours ago, playsoft said:

And graphics by @TIX

 

Thanks Paul, I've updated the post. 🙂

 

- James

[BIGHMW]

I also, enjoy Galagish, as much as I enjoy Galagon on my 2600 Jr. this version definitely takes the cake. I’m sure Paul Lay @playsoft must be very proud that his original POC has now been worked on to make a full fledged work of its own,

 

I remember reviewing Paul’s original POC on the 5200 Edition of The Atari Report (yes that YouTube channel is still up and running despite me not filming episodes of it in nearly 3 years) several years ago and when he disappeared from the 5200 scene for a while we thought this would never be worked on let alone be morphed into the wonderful version we’re fortunate to have now.

 

I hope that maybe this can be fully completed in the short future and maybe just maybe I might get back into filming episodes of The Atari Report again and review it. Keep it up!!!

[Gimmee99]

Time for another update from me, and likely that last substantive one for a while.  Attached is a new build with some cool stuff that might work.

 

1. New splash screen. You do have to press the START button to move past it, but at least there is support for a 9 color Graphics 10 splash screen WITH COMPRESSION that playsoft added.

    All you graphic artist can have a try at making a splash screen that is better than the included one that I did.

 

2. A new Microsoft Word document that describes everything I have learned about the project during my hacking experiments.  It gives info on how to change the splash screen, the character set, and other graphical elements.

 

3. New bolder colors option and a sleeker player ship from @RB5200.  The bold binaries start with "b".  Instructions for building them are in the readme doc.

 

4. Half of an implementation to make the game a little harder. Now you only get the double ship after 3 boss kills.  And your bonus ships are capped at 7.  This stuff might not work exactly right because i haven't tested much, 

    so your mileage may vary.

 

As I say in the readme, no need to comment asking me for more extensive features (challenge stage, ship capture, arcade perfect port things, etc).  I have reached the end of my skillset and just enjoy the game at its current state.  I will likely continue to make subtle changes, and try to get the boss kill stuff right, but other than that I am essentially done and leave the harder stuff to people better than me in this 8-bit world. 

Build7_22.zip

[Gimmee99]

And of course there was a bug as expected in the "kill the boss 3 times to get a double ship" experiment.  I think the attached fixes it.  In reality, I think because of my total disregard for zero based counting, you actually have to kill the boss three times sometimes and 4 times others to get the double ship, but it should now kind of work.  And it does balance the difficulty of the game IMHO.  Rather than post the whole build again, here are just the binaries and the one changed source file.

bosskillfix.zip

[Gimmee99]

I keep saying I am done with this for a while, and Paul keeps motivating and helping me onward with great little tidbits of code !!!  Yesterday he added the ability on the splash screen to have a scrolling message at the bottom.  This makes it possible to not waste space in the bitmap (which is only 80 pixels wide) trying to have readable text.  It is too good an example not to share.  Also to help me debug the "hit the boss three times to get a double ship", I added a counter for how many bosses you have hit in the status bar.  I think right now you have to hit 3 bosses for the first double ship and then 4 thereafter. In the example below, I have two boss hits, indicated by the two dots.

 

 

If nothing else, I wanted to post here so that everyone has the source and an example of the scrolling text for the splash screen.

Scroll.zip

[FifthPlayer]

What's the difference between bgish(a8/5200) and gish(a8/5200) in the download zip?

[Gimmee99]

2 hours ago, FifthPlayer said:

What's the difference between bgish(a8/5200) and gish(a8/5200) in the download zip?

Look up a couple of posts for the details.  In short, the "b" binaries have bolder/darker colors as recommended by @RB5200.  The b version also has (i think) a slightly sleeker sprite for the player ship. I might be remembering wrong.

[Mi1ez]

I'm having a hard time figuring out what to download to try this out.  Is there an actual download for A8 or 5200 in here for the game, or just code samples (not that I mind that at all!)?

[Gimmee99]

5 hours ago, Mi1ez said:

I'm having a hard time figuring out what to download to try this out.  Is there an actual download for A8 or 5200 in here for the game, or just code samples (not that I mind that at all!)?

I can only speak to running the binaries on an emulator (in my case, specifically Altirra).  In general, the steps would be:

 

1. Download and install Altirra (any google search will find it)

2. Download the scroll.zip from a couple of posts ago and unzip it.

3. In Altirra, do File Open Image and pick either of the .xex files

 

The emulator can be configured as practically every variety of Atari 8-bit computer and 5200 with a million options. 

If you configure the emulator to be a 5200 and figure out how to configure the joystick to something that works good for you, you can open the .bin file and run the "5200" version of the game which is visually identical to the other one.

[Gimmee99]

Another build to play/experiment with.  As I mentioned before, things are not really getting any "better", I am just tweaking a couple of things to see if anyone likes them better or worse.  Changes in this experiment are:

 

1. Changed the starfield to twinkle red and really light blue (almost white).  I like the colorful stars of Galaxian and the Galaga on the NES, so this was a try at making the starfield have a little color.

2. New title screen with the Galaga spaceship and a specific area to have a "build number" in the title so it's easy to keep track of what experiment you are running.  Month/Day/Year in the title tells you when that build happened.

 

As usual, I have played the 8-bit binaries for about 10 minutes and the 5200 bits for about 30 seconds, so feel free to tell me if something is broken.

gish85.zip

[ALEXANDER]

On 8/5/2024 at 12:33 PM, Gimmee99 said:

Another build to play/experiment with.  As I mentioned before, things are not really getting any "better", I am just tweaking a couple of things to see if anyone likes them better or worse.  Changes in this experiment are:

 

1. Changed the starfield to twinkle red and really light blue (almost white).  I like the colorful stars of Galaxian and the Galaga on the NES, so this was a try at making the starfield have a little color.

2. New title screen with the Galaga spaceship and a specific area to have a "build number" in the title so it's easy to keep track of what experiment you are running.  Month/Day/Year in the title tells you when that build happened.

 

As usual, I have played the 8-bit binaries for about 10 minutes and the 5200 bits for about 30 seconds, so feel free to tell me if something is broken.

gish85.zip 58.47 kB · 202 downloads

Great advance ! just only remains special stages and the alien leader ship absirve you.

 

[Gimmee99]

Another minor experiment.  Happy to receive feedback, but all but one of the changes here are just aesthetics, if you don't like them, just revert to the 8/5 build.

 

In an effort to make Galagish seem a little bit *less* like a Galaga clone, and more like a variation and a mini-game in its own right, I wanted to change the numeral font to something that was different.  I personally like the OCR computery looking digits that you see in some fonts, and I found the amazing work of Damien Guard over at https://damieng.com/typography/zx-origins/.  He has literally hundreds of 8x8 fonts for use in things like this.  I took the digits from a couple of different ones (everything except the 8 and 4 from Computer 60s') and tweaked the 4 and 8 just a bit to my taste.  The result is that the score, ships left indicator, and level now use the new font.  Also the letter "L" that indicates the level has been changed to that font style.  

 

 

The only other real change is that I upped the number of boss hits required to get the double ship to 6.  I felt like the old value of 3 or 4 was still a little too easy.  So it's a little harder to get the double ship now.  

 

I also updated the splash screen to have 81924 so that you know its the build from August 19, 2024.  

081924.zip

[patjomki]

I'd like to see a game that looks more instead of less like a galaga clone so I stick to the version before this one.

 

Apart from that I appreciate your work and I am curious in which direction your project is heading.