Lucky strike

30th June 2012

Slightly late than never :). Today more work has been done to the Trance Sector bouncing bonus ball. A few days ago, I got the ball to bounce around the screen. Today I did some more work on it. I created some subroutines which sets the counter of the ball to appear. Then it spawns in. After a full cycle of some of the features, I made it spawn out again. 

As well as this feature, I added a subroutine to test the collision of a rocket and the bouncing ball. If the rocket hit the ball (depending on what the ball has) the player gets rewarded either 100 points, 200 points, 500 points, Lighting of letters E,X,T,R,A (To indicate and extra life) or a smart bomb, which will destroy all rockets on screen. I also made it that if a rocket hits the ball, the ball disappears and the rockets explode. Here's a video of the work done so far. I still have the E,X,T,R,A  routine to bug fix - and award extra lives properly. That can wait some other time later on this week ;)

... And the bonus ball is ...

27th June 2012

I only had 2 hours spare, which gave me some time to work a little more on Trance Sector, since finishing Escape from Zaphod  using the 3D construction kit last week (Hard work).. I took a look at the sprite data to work out what the ball's value should be, and created a frame table in which would indicate the colour for the particular bonus object. I created a few values to check the direction of which direction the ball should be bouncing. A few subroutines were also programmed in to get that ball moving according to direction. Yep, it bounced around the screen how I hoped, but was a bit too fast. So I slowed it down by adding a speed delay to it. I also created a sub routine that could cycle the colour of the bonus ball. The same was done for the frame type. Since I didn't want the ball colour and frame cycle to go too fast, I just had to sort something out to stop this. So I created a delay. Now the objects and colours are cycling to how I hoped they would. 

... and here's the result so far. :)

As you can see, I have a ball bouncing around the screen, but what use is it where there's no way of being able to touch the object to destroy it? Well, because of being short of time I had because of work. This will be resolved hopefully some time this Friday, if I don't get called or text into work that is :) The plan in general will be to get the bouncing ball to disappear if one of the seekers/missiles hits the ball. Whatever frame the ball last had will result 100 points, 200 points, 500 points, an automatic bomb to destroy all seekers or a lit up E-X-T-R-A (In which, when fully lit will award the player an extra life). I better work on the collision and checks for what's resulted from the ball.

Let's make some noise

11th June 2012

I don't tend to get much free time on a weekday, but I got up early to make up the free time, because of working a 12pm-8pm work shift at a 24 hour Distribution Centre. Anyway, glad to have found time to get sound effects in action. On Saturday, I was thinking about using the Sub Hunter unused in game sound effects for this game. The sound effects were originally created by me using the Maniacs of Noise SFX Editor by Roland Hermans. On Saturday I had problems getting the sounds to work correctly, and yesterday I almost reprogrammed sound effects - but was fed up and gave up at the end.

Anyway this morning I got back to the source code, to work out why (on Saturday) the SFX was playing with buzzing noises in the background. It turned out to be the case that in game music was also trying to play as well. So to fix this problem, I created a little switch routine, to switch between music and sound effects. If the music option = 0 then the music could play, otherwise if it was = 1 then play only sfx until after a level's complete. This trick worked quite well. After testing the SFX, they worked out pretty well. Love the explosion sounds of the seekers, and also the player collect sound works quite well. So far so good.

Just one more thing to do quickly before I had to set off and catch the bus to work. This was a small thing to do. I drew two extra sprites - one for the music (a music note icon was drawn for that one) and also a sprite for sfx (a speaker with waves coming out). I imported the sprites into the source code and also added a pointer which can detect whether music or sfx is selected, according to whether the player pushes left or right on the joystick in port 2. 

Here's a video of the game with Sound Effects for you ;)

A disappearing act

3rd June 2012


I thought I'd be losing some free time today, but I have one way or another. Today I felt like doing more work on Trance Sector, as last week I sort of missed out on it, for some reason. So then, what has happened today then? Well, let's continue yakking away ;)

First of all, I loaded up the SpritePad editor, because my next task is to do a spawn and disappearance of all game sprites. So I drew another 4 frames for the sprites. Then I worked on some sound effects to make a similar sound to Bulldog (Where the player appears and disappears). It worked out quite well, and I was pretty much pleased with it. I also made a sound for another idea I had (level complete explosion effect). Then I imported both updated sounds and sprites into the source code. I had to relocate the game sprites to $3000 and change the value of the animation / sprite type values. This was because of the sound effects/music taking over the memory at $2000. I also had to alter the variables that were pointed to $3xxx and make them point to $2xxx instead.

Now I programmed a few additional routines. The first of which was to spawn all of the sprites on to the game screen. I made them appear by using an expanding '+' type of sprite. I set the frames and pointers for the animation, and added the 'ding' style sound to make the player appear. Well, it turned out quite well. Then in the Level Complete routine, I got all of the sprites to disappear by using the same '+' sprite, but disappearing in reverse.

Next I wanted to add some effect to the level screen. So I decided to make the level's background multicolour colours, use the panic colours in high speed mode. I added a sound effect to this as well. Then I added a simple exploding screen and used the player's death sound for the quick explosion. Then the main Level Complete message + jingle comes on. Feels quite great. Check out the video: