"ANUBIS" ... a new side-scrolling shooter

[Retrospect]

Seriously thinking of changing the name of the game now though.  

[+Ksarul]

57 minutes ago, Retrospect said:

Seriously thinking of changing the name of the game now though.  

Attempting to get @OLD CS1's idea out of your head are you? Changing the name probably won't help there, as it will keep sneaking up on you when you least expect it to--and the maniacal chuckle it elicits from you when it does will have your family seriously wondering about your sanity. No worries about being alone there though--my family came to that state when contemplating me a long time ago, LOLOL.

[Retrospect]

More changes .... it now has "atmospheric noise" , and a player fire sound that i'm not at all sure about.  I've slowed down the enemy explosions so they actually sound and look how they were meant to ..... it's all good so far ..... 

 

 

 

[Retrospect]

13 minutes ago, Ksarul said:

and the maniacal chuckle it elicits from you when it does will have your family seriously wondering about your sanity

Yes I can relate.  Alas for me it is too late!

[+OLD CS1]

15 minutes ago, Retrospect said:

More changes .... it now has "atmospheric noise" , and a player fire sound that i'm not at all sure about.  I've slowed down the enemy explosions so they actually sound and look how they were meant to ..... it's all good so far ..... 

I like the enemy explosion sound.  The firing noise... could be better.  I think if it executed more quickly, like maybe a split second rather than the duration of missile flight.  And tell you this, those saucers are cheeky enough to be a later stage enemy.  And, yeah, the power-ups, dual missile things, maybe additional missile or maneuvering speed.

 

Okay, now saucers firing.  Maybe a later level power-up for them.  But give the ship something to compensate.  They are little bastards right now.  Maybe a single-hit shield for a ship power-up to help out.

[Retrospect]

1 minute ago, OLD CS1 said:

I like the enemy explosion sound.  The firing noise... could be better.  I think if it executed more quickly, like maybe a split second rather than the duration of missile flight.  And tell you this, those saucers are cheeky enough to be a later stage enemy.

Yeah I was thinking that - they're end of level territory are those bad boys.  

The fire sound isn't actually meant to last the duration of the missile travel.  It doesn't depend upon the missile at all, it's got it's own routine and timers.  I might take out the slight delay that I did put in, and make it either deeper, or a different noise altogether.  

[+OLD CS1]

@Retrospect I was a bad boy and made some edits while you were responding.

[Retrospect]

12 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

@Retrospect I was a bad boy and made some edits while you were responding.

Yeah I re-read it all .  It's something to consider.  I can do the power up missiles, and the ships movement speed is another good power up, those are both power-ups featured in a game that came out in the UK called Project X - a similar theme to this game.  'cept that had speech .... and this won't have.  'Cos TI did it all wrong with the speech ya know.  

For example ; how we can do sound on the TI we can set it like this CALL SOUND(-250,110,30,110,30,1000,30,-8,0) ... that negative duration means it can play whilst things are happening ... why did they not allow this for speech?  CALL SAY(-"HELLO") would have been good, if it didn't halt the CPU 

[+OLD CS1]

1 hour ago, Retrospect said:

Seriously thinking of changing the name of the game now though.  

If it helps, keep in mind that Anubis is the Egyptian god of the dead, and in recent pop culture is a Goa'uld who gained extraordinary power by half-ascendance.  The former not so evil, by helping maintain the cycle of life and death, and the latter very evil.

[Retrospect]

Warning system has been put in , Anubis did have this before , but I never re-did it on any re-writes.  

 

For my next coding session the flying saucers will be toned down a little bit as they are only the 2nd enemy ... however, they will re-appear as the last enemy of each level, with lasers firing at the player as well as driving like maniacs.  There's going to be five different enemies per level.  

 

 

 

 

 

[SkyPilot]

Reminds me of Parsec.

[SteveB]

1 hour ago, SkyPilot said:

Reminds me of Parsec.

 

[Retrospect]

5 hours ago, SkyPilot said:

Reminds me of Parsec.

Well I think at this point there's no denying it has Parsec elements.  The textual warning system of enemies incoming is a Parsec element, are the twinkling moving stars and the background ambience noise that I recently implemented.    The rest of it though, has elements of Nemesis/Gradius .... And I can tell you that for certain because that's where I nicked some of the sprites from.   

I think as someone pointed out earlier in this thread that if something written in XB and compiled reminds people of Parsec, I'm doing well.   The intention though as I say again is not to recreate Parsec or a sequel in any way, I can't touch what Dramis and Urbanus did with that fantastic game I really can't.  

[Retrospect]

I forgot to give credit to Aubree Anderson, the lady who provided the voice of Parsec.  There's no way I can implement such a thing into my program but if I could do it , (never say never - one day I shall be an assembly coder ...) then I would like the voice of William Daniels.  

[Retrospect]

Weaponized saucers are in.   Next to do :  Make player ship get upgraded missile upon new level (only happens 2 times), faster moves, and make enemies take two shots to kill on 2nd level onwards.

That's why they're all one color now instead of all sorts of colors because I want them to turn white when hit once to signify you need to hit it again.

 

 

 

[Retrospect]

Level 2 reached in this clip.  Player gets upgraded weapon.   Next time I program, I'm going to make it award the player with an extra ship each time they get to a new level.

The enemies that were easy on level 1 become lethal in level 2 because they take two shots to kill.

 

Also I need a better transition between levels than a simple "ding" noise.  It's early stages still.

 

 

 

[Retrospect]

So now it awards an extra ship, at the start of a new level IF the player ships are less than 4 .... also , for now , it just upgrades the weapon , and it will do this twice.  You get a two-shot weapon and then if you are lucky enough to reach level 3 you get 3 shot weapon (3 bolts in one sprite) .. I'm going to work on getting the ship more speed (up to a point) at a later time.  

 

Amendments will have to be made to make the 1st couple of levels easier , as this game is one of the trickiest i've ever made.  Robots of Death was like a trip to Asda compared to this.

[Retrospect]

Found a nifty bit of code in the Smart Programmers Guide that has given me a much better enemy missile.  Used it for the Weaponized Saucers.

CALL SPRITE(#4,116,16,R,C,(Y-R)/4,(X-C)/4)::a11=1   

I just need to make it faster by using /3 instead of /4.  

 

Well.  I made the missile faster.  This was the result.

 

 

[SkyPilot]

21 hours ago, Retrospect said:

Well I think at this point there's no denying it has Parsec elements.  The textual warning system of enemies incoming is a Parsec element, are the twinkling moving stars and the background ambience noise that I recently implemented.    The rest of it though, has elements of Nemesis/Gradius .... And I can tell you that for certain because that's where I nicked some of the sprites from.   

I think as someone pointed out earlier in this thread that if something written in XB and compiled reminds people of Parsec, I'm doing well.   The intention though as I say again is not to recreate Parsec or a sequel in any way, I can't touch what Dramis and Urbanus did with that fantastic game I really can't.  

 

Looks fantastic tho.

[+OLD CS1]

The weaponized saucers have a behavior reminiscent of Defender on the Atari 2600.  Nice.

[sometimes99er]

22 hours ago, Retrospect said:

The rest of it though, has elements of Nemesis/Gradius .... And I can tell you that for certain because that's where I nicked some of the sprites from.

Oh. 😐
 

[Retrospect]

5 hours ago, sometimes99er said:

Oh. 😐
 

Well, I'm not the best graphics guy out there.  The flying saucers are mine though, as are all the background graphics and the death ship animations.  There's an enemy designed by Oddemann Kristensen in there as well which I thought was nice.  

[Retrospect]

6 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

The weaponized saucers have a behavior reminiscent of Defender on the Atari 2600.  Nice.

i just went on youtube to have a look at that.  You're right.  Never thought of Defender!   

 

[Retrospect]

Anybody ...... Do we have a CALL LOAD command that will detect if any sprite has left the normal parameters of the screen?  If such a thing exists it would be a quicker and smarter method of detecting wether the player missile has left the screen area before it wraps around. 

 

 

[retrodroid]

26 minutes ago, Retrospect said:

Anybody ...... Do we have a CALL LOAD command that will detect if any sprite has left the normal parameters of the screen?  If such a thing exists it would be a quicker and smarter method of detecting wether the player missile has left the screen area before it wraps around. 

 

 

Quicker than checking its X position to see if it's >255?