Lyra the Tenrec (Completed)

[ZippyRedPlumber]

Updated the first post to include the newest build.

[ZippyRedPlumber]

Sorry if this bump is unnecessary, but do you guys like my game? Currently having self-esteem & low confidence problems so I'd really like to hear some feedback.

[+Random Terrain]

15 minutes ago, ZippyRedPlumber said:

Currently having self-esteem & low confidence problems so I'd really like to hear some feedback.

 

Here are a few links that might be helpful:

 

https://www.randomterrain.com/rt-motivation-and-creativity-page-for-programmers.html

 

https://www.randomterrain.com/favorite-quotes-self-confidence.html

 

https://www.randomterrain.com/game-design.html#how_to_make_a_fun_game

 

https://www.randomterrain.com/game-design.html#cure_for_sos_syndrome

 

 

[+Karl G]

10 hours ago, ZippyRedPlumber said:

Sorry if this bump is unnecessary, but do you guys like my game? Currently having self-esteem & low confidence problems so I'd really like to hear some feedback.

I hadn't tried your latest build until just now. I would say it's a pretty good first game. The graphics, sounds, animations, and movement/jumping controls all feel good. I'm not a huge fan of the gameplay itself, honestly, but I don't have any specific suggestions, so I'm not much help there.

 

You mention in your first post that you had to give up missile0 because you added the statusbar for a timer. I can't think of any reason this would cause you to lose missile0.

 

At any rate, if you feel this title is done, then by all means use what you have learned from making this one to produce something new! I personally have started many more projects than I have finished, and not all of the ones I have finished were of wider interest to the community. I enjoyed the creation process and learning new things regardless of where the projects ended up going, though.  ? 

[Fort Apocalypse]

On 7/12/2022 at 11:35 PM, ZippyRedPlumber said:

Sorry if this bump is unnecessary, but do you guys like my game? Currently having self-esteem & low confidence problems so I'd really like to hear some feedback.

 

I like it! It's very challenging.

 

What I liked about some earlier versions of your game was that even with just a few elements to the gameplay at that point, it was challenging and rewarding to try to jump over or on top of things that were moving to do what I thought was gaining points. I felt like I could master it if I tried, so I played it over and over several times- and that's a lot of times for me, so I liked it a lot. As more elements to the game were added, I felt like it was challenging, but I didn't feel as much like there was a skill I could work over time to master to get better at it. In some versions, it was too difficult for me, and I didn't understand the gameplay. In the more recent versions, I just have to hop back and forth across the middle and top platforms, and eventually I would die.

 

I could say that evening out the level of difficulty on each platform in the game might be good, so that it's not harder to be on the ground level. But, if you were to take that advice and apply it to Joust, it would've been boring, because the lava, hand, and lost eggs next to the lower platform were some of the coolest parts of the game. However, in Bubble Bobble there was consistency in gameplay across its vertical platforms, so, for it, maybe consistency would've been good advice.

 

As for self-esteem, I know what it's like to have low self-esteem and low confidence. Developers put a lot of work into things, whether it's games or less fun stuff, and we often don't get feedback or praise.

 

I watched an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto in a series called 8bit Legacy, and one of the things he said struck me enough that I wrote it down and keep it nearby: (translated to English) "It is important to create what you desire to, not what people expect you to."

 

Personally, if I stop having fun writing a game, I do something else until I get inspired again. It's awesome to be able to just think of something and create it.

 

All that said: Lyra is great! Keep it up.

 

 

Edited July 14, 2022 by Fort Apocalypse

[ZippyRedPlumber]

3 hours ago, Karl G said:

You mention in your first post that you had to give up missile0 because you added the statusbar for a timer. I can't think of any reason this would cause you to lose missile0.

Oh missile0 was sacrificed because of the fancy playfield using the kernel options

[Fort Apocalypse]

If the point of getting the blue squares is just to get points, then maybe get rid of the blue bar? Or maybe the blue bar could build up and once it hits the green bar, then you'd win that level and move to the next level with a less long green bar? I may be misunderstanding the gameplay around the blue bar, though. A manual or description of the gameplay in the first post would be helpful.

 

Could the shots at the bottom alternate between each platform level? Otherwise, I just end up avoiding the ground floor because it's so dangerous, and then I just have to jump between the left and right parts of the screen and eventually die, because I'm not that good at it. If the shots were coming from different levels, then I'd have to avoid the bubble and the missile. That might be too much, I don't know. Maybe the speed of the missile and/or bubble could increase as time goes on or with different levels.

 

If you were to do a Lyra II, maybe Lyra could fall through holes in the floor and go to other screens left/right/up/down from the current screen, similar to Aztec, but with moving holes in the floor that you could jump up and down through, and the big bubble guy might be a gelatinous cube on one screen, or some other monster on other screens.

Edited July 14, 2022 by Fort Apocalypse

[ZippyRedPlumber]

Quote

If the point of getting the blue squares is just to get points, then maybe get rid of the blue bar? Or maybe the blue bar could build up and once it hits the green bar, then you'd win that level and move to the next level with a less long green bar? I may be misunderstanding the gameplay around the blue bar, though. A manual or description of the gameplay in the first post would be helpful.

Currently taking your suggestion to heart, I plan on making an instructional readme as well as box & cart art soon

Quote

Could the shots at the bottom alternate between each platform level? Otherwise, I just end up avoiding the ground floor because it's so dangerous, and then I just have to jump between the left and right parts of the screen and eventually die, because I'm not that good at it. If the shots were coming from different levels, then I'd have to avoid the bubble and the missile. That might be too much, I don't know. Maybe the speed of the missile and/or bubble could increase as time goes on or with different levels.

Tried making the ball move at random areas of the field, VbB kept giving me errors, as for the eyebot speed it can be changed by using the difficulty switches.

 

I have 174 bytes of ROM space left in bank 1 which is where the main loop is, I want to add one more level with a different enemy. How can I do it without using up all the bytes?

[Fort Apocalypse]

6 hours ago, ZippyRedPlumber said:

I have 174 bytes of ROM space left in bank 1 which is where the main loop is, I want to add one more level with a different enemy. How can I do it without using up all the bytes?

Here are some thoughts:

• NUSIZx to make a sprite bigger for a boss level.
• use different colors and increase speed of movement, like in Berzerk.
• refactor or reduce complexity to free space.
• there are optimizations that you can do manually that are non-obvious. For example, I had some code that had a list of conditionals (if's) each doing gosub and I replaced it with on ... goto and saved space. It would be great to spend the time to figure this sort of thing out, so it's well documented and less reinvention of the wheel each time by everyone.
• set romsize X to get more space to work with.
• set optimization size (I think it's the default so it probably won't help, but just saying)
• (related thread) put multiple sprites into single sprite: it's a big sprite then use player0pointerlo, player0pointerhi, player0height and/or player1pointerlo, player1pointerhi, player1height.
• removing unnecessary includes. For example: you may not need to include fixed_point_math.asm
• remove empty bit rows from player sprites.
• using logic/calculations vs. data for things like music.
• simplifying or removing title screen (or selection screen, etc.). In a game like River Raid, it can't start automatically into the game loop, because the player would die when unattended, and that takes a little extra code, and I think Lyra's in that boat. But in Tanks 2022, I ended up just starting the game as soon as it's turned on to save space.

 

 

Edited July 16, 2022 by Fort Apocalypse

[ZippyRedPlumber]

It seems no matter what I do bB keeps giving me lip, tell me how do I resolve this?

 

Quote

--- Unresolved Symbol List
qtcontroller             0000 ????         (R )

 

[+Random Terrain]

2 hours ago, ZippyRedPlumber said:

It seems no matter what I do bB keeps giving me lip, tell me how do I resolve this?

 

Did you search your code for "qtcontroller" to see if it's there?

[Fort Apocalypse]

13 hours ago, ZippyRedPlumber said:

It seems no matter what I do bB keeps giving me lip, tell me how do I resolve this?

 

 

qtcontroller is for Quadtari.

 

For bB 1.5, I would've said:

 

If you put one or more Quadtari kernel files into your directory, they may be messing you up. A couple of possible methods for keeping that from happening are to either have a project directory per bB game (which is probably the best practice) or to at least have one other directory for Quadtari games to keep those separate and those kernel files specifically for it can live in that.

 

For bB 1.6 and 1.7: one of the errors I've gotten, not all the time, but in conjunction with another error like a syntax error, was:

batari Basic v1.7 (c)2022
2600 Basic compilation complete.
--- Unresolved Symbol List
qtcontroller             0000 ????         (R )
...
... error: Syntax Error '#10.1'.
...

And I didn't have any of Karl G's kernels for Quadtari in my directory. So, I think it's mistaken output in bB 1.6 and 1.7 due to the addition of the multiplexer for Quadtari in this commit to bB which probably needs some additional check somewhere to avoid it erroneously complaining about qtcontroller.

 

I also confirmed that this qtcontroller unresolved symbol doesn't show in bB 1.5.

 

So, my guess is that it should be ignored for now, but @RevEng could tell you for sure.

Edited July 19, 2022 by Fort Apocalypse

[RevEng]

TL;DR... you can ignore it - it's not the cause of your error. It will be hidden away next release.

 

When dasm runs into an error, it spits out all of the undefined symbols. The idea is that one of them might be the problem (e.g. if you misspell a variable/symbol somewhere in your code) , which is supposed to help you track the problem down. But the bB asm code has a lot of optional features, which means it has a ton of symbols that don't need to get defined in any one project, since those symbols don't actually get referenced in any used code.

 

The bbfilter command is supposed to hide those official bB symbols away from the error output, since they're almost certainly not the cause of your issues. It looks like we just need to add "qtcontroller" to the filter. But none of that is the actual source of the assembly error - it's just a red herring we failed to hide.

[ZippyRedPlumber]

Did you guys like the timed aspect? Or do you want me to omit it...

[Fort Apocalypse]

3 hours ago, ZippyRedPlumber said:

Did you guys like the timed aspect? Or do you want me to omit it...

Do whatever you think is best. I personally think it's challenging without the timed aspect, so maybe it could be a difficulty setting or at a later level.

 

You could also have the walls/ceiling/floor close in over time, or the floor removed like in Joust; maybe the floor and top platform could alternate in disappearing and reappearing.

 

 

Edited July 23, 2022 by Fort Apocalypse

[ZippyRedPlumber]

Ran into a MAJOR problem now everytime I compile the rom it now gives me an error saying dasm stopped working... 

 

EDIT: figured out what the problem was, it was a macro file I downloaded for another project I was working on.

Edited July 29, 2022 by ZippyRedPlumber

[ZippyRedPlumber]

Any idea how make enemies speed up when a certain score is reached?

[+Karl G]

1 hour ago, ZippyRedPlumber said:

Any idea how make enemies speed up when a certain score is reached?

It's probably easier if you use fixed-point variables for enemy position, and then you can change what fractional value you add or subtract from their position depending on the current score. The linked section above in the bB guide gives an example of using fixed-point variables for positioning like this.

 

Checking to see if the score is above a certain value will require declaring the 3 score variables separately, and doing BCD comparisons against those. There's also information in the bB guide on how to do comparisons involving the score like this, but there's not a specific section to link to in this case. Search for the text "Conditional statements don't work properly with the score" in the bB guide, and the explanation follows from there.

[+Random Terrain]

https://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-batari-basic-commands.html#check_score

[+Karl G]

24 minutes ago, Random Terrain said:

https://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-batari-basic-commands.html#check_score

Cool. I didn't see a heading to grab a link from there.  

[ZippyRedPlumber]

At long last, it's finally finished well as finished as finish could be at least. Changes include altered platforms in the playfield, enemies get increasingly fast when half of the wafers are collected (think Space Invaders/Mario Bros.) Difficulty switch A serves as a separate game mode, where enemies go faster then slower. I can't do anymore because few things 1. I'm creatively tapped as used the last of my creative muscle on this, and 2. I only have 7 bytes left on the rom & I really don't feel like adding 2 more banks. Not only have I included the rom file, I also have a zip folder containing goodies like a manual, changelog, box art, label art and the rom. Well, time to take a small break from 2600Basic for now & focus on porting this to 7800.

 

Rom file: lyra_RC3_2022y_08m_29d_0551t.bas.bin

 

Zip: Lyra_The_Tenrec.zip

Edited September 1, 2022 by ZippyRedPlumber

[alfredtdk]

Very good. I liked.
The game has evolved very well since the first versions and if it's the final version it's already great the way it is.
I also loved the title screen and the intro music. Congratulations.

[ZippyRedPlumber]

felt like making tweaks to the game despite it being declared complete can someone help me with this error?

Quote

--VERBOSE ERROR MESSAGE --
batari Basic v1.7 (c)2022
(1344) Error: invalid operator: 0

 

[+Random Terrain]

If you use Save As before making any significant changes to your program and your latest version won't compile, don't worry. You can use WinMerge to compare the latest file that works with the one that doesn't. You can see the differences and quickly track down the problem.

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=WinMerge+differencing+and+merging+tool

 

Be sure to post what the problem was and I'll add it to the bB page.

[ZippyRedPlumber]

1 hour ago, Random Terrain said:

If you use Save As before making any significant changes to your program and your latest version won't compile, don't worry. You can use WinMerge to compare the latest file that works with the one that doesn't. You can see the differences and quickly track down the problem.

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=WinMerge+differencing+and+merging+tool

 

Be sure to post what the problem was and I'll add it to the bB page.

@Random TerrainAnything having to deal with numbers and particularly 0

 

Quote

   ;***************************************************************
   ;
   ;  Enemy movement.
   ;
   if _sc1 = $00 && _sc2 = $20 && _sc3 = $00 then goto ___skip_speed_increase

   if _sc1 = $00 && _sc2 = $40 && _sc3 = $00 then goto ___skip_sped_increase

   if player1y < player0y then _P1_y = _P1_y + 0.20
   if player1y > player0y then _P1_y = _P1_y - 0.20
   if player1x < player0x then _P1_x = _P1_x + 0.20
   if player1x > player0x then _P1_x = _P1_x - 0.20

   goto ___done_speed_increase

___skip_speed_increase

   if player1y < player0y then _P1_y = _P1_y + 0.40
   if player1y > player0y then _P1_y = _P1_y - 0.40
   if player1x < player0x then _P1_x = _P1_x + 0.40
   if player1x > player0x then _P1_x = _P1_x - 0.40

___skip_sped_increase

   if player1y < player0y then _P1_y = _P1_y + 0.60
   if player1y > player0y then _P1_y = _P1_y - 0.60
   if player1x < player0x then _P1_x = _P1_x + 0.60
   if player1x > player0x then _P1_x = _P1_x - 0.60

___done_speed_increase