Tunderchild - WIP shmup game

[Eiswuxe]

Hi all,

as some of you might have heared, my giana sisters homebrew is on hiatus since Im not sure what the original IP holder will be coming up with in the future. Chances are I can work together with them (Im already in contact), but its not clear at the moment.
Thats why I started creating a new originalgame, with my own "IP", so no one is holding me back from releasing this one (except lazyness and procrastination!!!) 😃 
My goal is to bring a classic shmup game to the intellivision. With upgradeable weapons, powerups, lots of enemies, parallax backgrounds and huge levels.
The level shown is a proof of concept that this can all be done on the Intellivision. Of course using the awesome Inty Basic by @nanochess
The music is played using the inty tracker. Many thanks to @DZ-Jay for his massive help on the tracker and inty dev in general!
Here is a video of the first WIP level
 

 

[carlsson]

Wow! It looks amazing and with enough mechanisms to be recognizable without being a copy of something else. Great work, and the tracker music really adds one more dimension to the game.

[+DZ-Jay]

3 hours ago, Eiswuxe said:

Hi all,

as some of you might have heared, my giana sisters homebrew is on hiatus since Im not sure what the original IP holder will be coming up with in the future. Chances are I can work together with them (Im already in contact), but its not clear at the moment.
Thats why I started creating a new originalgame, with my own "IP", so no one is holding me back from releasing this one (except lazyness and procrastination!!!) 😃 
My goal is to bring a classic shmup game to the intellivision. With upgradeable weapons, powerups, lots of enemies, parallax backgrounds and huge levels.
The level shown is a proof of concept that this can all be done on the Intellivision. Of course using the awesome Inty Basic by @nanochess
The music is played using the inty tracker. Many thanks to @DZ-Jay for his massive help on the tracker and inty dev in general!
Here is a video of the first WIP level
 

 

 

Looks great and the music is very nice and fitting.  I do have one comment, though -- are the sound effects in key with the music?  All together during game-play it sounds a bit ... off.

 

Also, at least for the intro scene, let me know if you need some nice synth drum sounds -- at least they can be played in the secondary PSG as a bonus, for those who have an ECS attached.

 

       -dZ.

[diamax]

Amazing works ! Very impressive for the intellivision ! Do you know when it will come out approximatively ?

[Eiswuxe]

Thanks for the praises!

@DZ-Jay the sounds are not in the same key. I must admit I never thought about making the sound effects "fit" the music. Since the music will vary, I think this is quite a cumbersome approach?

I also thought about six channel music. But for my first game I would like to keep the workload reasonable and save this for later titles.

 

@diamax since this is a spare time game, I dont really have a schedule yet. I am planning to do at least 10 levels. Every 2 levels with new settings and a boss enemy, so its still a lot to do. Dont expect this game to be finished in 2024 :P

[YerOut]

Although I'm sure post editing will fix it, I did notice the splash screen from the Captain's 1st response to the General says, "What are are your orders"

[+DZ-Jay]

1 hour ago, Eiswuxe said:

Thanks for the praises!

@DZ-Jay the sounds are not in the same key. I must admit I never thought about making the sound effects "fit" the music. Since the music will vary, I think this is quite a cumbersome approach?

 

It is something that old arcade games did, especially the ones from the major manufacturers.  Nintendo console games are a great example of this — they typically choose a key, compose all music on the same key, and sort of tune the sound effects to play in the same key, as possible.

 

It makes the games sound more harmonious.  It is subtle but very effective.

 

We did a similar thing on Christmas Carol, at the suggestion of Joe Z., who brought it up.  (He created all the sound effects, and I did the music.)

 

It is not necessarily that you should use the same notes, but that for sound effects that play tones, you should choose frequencies of notes within the same key used in the music — or at least close to them.

Just a suggestion.  I know that many games do not even consider such things.

 

1 hour ago, Eiswuxe said:

I also thought about six channel music. But for my first game I would like to keep the workload reasonable and save this for later titles.

I understand.  I thought perhaps that could be only during the title/intro sequence.

 

I know right now that the tracker supports only 3, or only 6 channels; and that if you choose the latter, you are stuck processing 6 channels even when you do not need them.

 

However, I think I can change that with a simple modification, to allow the tracker to support 3 or 6 channel tracks dynamically, based on a runtime configuration.

 

The offer is on the table, should you be interested.  No worries.

 

1 hour ago, Eiswuxe said:

@diamax since this is a spare time game, I dont really have a schedule yet. I am planning to do at least 10 levels. Every 2 levels with new settings and a boss enemy, so its still a lot to do. Dont expect this game to be finished in 2024

 

Looking forward to seeing more progress on this project.

 

    dZ.

[Eiswuxe]

17 minutes ago, YerOut said:

Although I'm sure post editing will fix it, I did notice the splash screen from the Captain's 1st response to the General says, "What are are your orders"

Thanks for the hint! I did not notice that even after seeing the screen a 100 times

[Eiswuxe]

14 minutes ago, DZ-Jay said:

you should choose frequencies of notes within the same key used in the music — or at lease close to them.

I see. Yes thats a great approach. At the moment the sound effects are created by just writing down a stream of frequencies in the code that get played. It should be possible to pick those frequencies from a list of notes used in the music (if time allows )

[+nanochess]

Wow! Kudos for this great effort.

 

Keep up the good work! 👍

[artrag]

Awesome!!

[majors]

Looks amazing. INTV continues to amaze me.

[+cmadruga]

For a moment there during the intro I thought I was going to see an R-Type port 🙂

Well done! 

 

Interesting pseudo parallax effect. I think I know how you are doing it... will give it a shot some time.

[wolfy62]

Wow!! That looks like a very fun game,and we definitely can use more space shmups on the Intellivision. 

Please keep up the great work and someday get this out to all of us gamers!😃👍

[Special Teams]

Looks and sounds awesome!

[+cjherr]

Definitely looking forward to this!

[Sinjinhawke]

Gives me PC Engine Super Darius vibes which is great as Intellivision and TG16 are my favourite retro consoles.

Excellent work so far.

[Eiswuxe]

11 hours ago, nanochess said:

Wow! Kudos for this great effort

Thank you! But It would never have been possible without INTYBasic, so thanks to you! Your Inty Books were my favorite holiday readings last year 😃

 

7 hours ago, cmadruga said:

Interesting pseudo parallax effect

Its a concept that I know from many C64 games (but also some INTY games use it, even some of the original games).
Basically you have the "animation" of the stars inside the cards. Then you define the cards based on the current x-scroll-value (0 - 7). if your screen moves one pixel left and the stars inside the card move one pixel right, it looks like they are standing still. If you define them every other frame, you get the impression that they move at half the speed. It takes up some ROM for the card data, but its worth the effort. Thanks to @DZ-Jay I was able to define multiple cards in one frame (as opposed to inty basics two "DEFINE" and "DEFINE ALTERNATE" buffered calls), so I can have the stars, the asteroid belt, the hud at the bottom and the spinning powerup graphics all animated at the same time,

[+cmadruga]

Thanks very interesting.  So how many cards are you redefining each frame in total?

[+DZ-Jay]

7 hours ago, Eiswuxe said:

Thanks to @DZ-Jay I was able to define multiple cards in one frame (as opposed to inty basics two "DEFINE" and "DEFINE ALTERNATE" buffered calls), so I can have the stars, the asteroid belt, the hud at the bottom and the spinning powerup graphics all animated at the same time,

Just a note on the above:  it is important to note that the limitation of DEFINE and DEFINE ALTERNATE is not on the number of cards it can copy — together they can copy up to a total of 16 to 18 cards per frame, depending on other circumstances.

 

The limitation is on how many blocks of contiguous GRAM cards can be loaded per frame.  DEFINE accepts one array as its source, along with a destination card; and DEFINE ALTERNATE accepts another source and destination — so you can only load up to two arrays or blocks or chunks at once.

 

If you want to, say, update the graphics of three sprites at once using three different sources and copying them to three different destinations on GRAM, you are out of luck.  You either have to stagger them on different frames, or muck around with Assembly language.

To be honest, I don’t recall doing anything for this — perhaps offering some technical details of the hardware.  As far as I know, that is all @Eiswuxe’s doing.  And it looks great. 👍

 

    dZ.

[+cmadruga]

So all in all he’s still not going beyond 16-18 per frame? For a moment I thought there was a workaround involved.

[+DZ-Jay]

18 minutes ago, cmadruga said:

So all in all he’s still not going beyond 16-18 per frame? For a moment I thought there was a workaround involved.

No, I don’t think so.  That’s why I added my comment, because I thought the trick could be misinterpreted.

 

Theoretically, the hardware can support up to 24 to 26 cards copied per frame — but that is in ideal conditions, with absolutely no overhead at all, starting the copy loop at the very start of the VBLANK interrupt, and just block-copy everything as a single continuous block.  Switching sources or destination will add overhead and reduce the number of cards.

 

However, IntyBASIC has some standard house-keeping stuff to do on every frame (as most Assembly games do also), which is why you can only get up to 18 cards per frame (16 when using MUSIC, which steals a bit of CPU cycles).

 

The limitation he was trying to overcome was how many distinct blocks could be copied into GRAM, where the source or destination (or both) are not contiguous.  DEFINE and DEFINE ALTERNATE gives you only 2.

 

    dZ.

[+grips03]

Looks great.

 

[IntyFanMatt]

Looks awesome! If anyone remembers Lifeforce on the NES, which is a great game, it reminds me of that. And that’s a good thing.

[Eiswuxe]

On 9/27/2024 at 4:45 PM, cmadruga said:

So all in all he’s still not going beyond 16-18 per frame? For a moment I thought there was a workaround involved.

@DZ-Jay already explained it very well. I'm sorry for the confusion. I cannot go beyond the limit of how many cards can be defined per frame. I just went beyond the limit of inty basic which limits me to defining two consecutive arrays per frame.

I also split some of the definitions across multiple frames. But stuff like the stars, the asteroid belt and the "fake static HUD at the bottom" need to be updated every second frame (thats the scroll speed). This would not be possible if I could only update two batches at once.