Titles

Thanks for the title suggestions everyone!

The 3 suggestions that I like the best were:

• Pew Pew Pew
• Reginald McGillicutty's Big Boom Blast Party
• Spacey McRacey

After some thought, I decided:

Pew Pew Pew just isn't google-able enough. There's too many cultural references to "Pew Pew Pew" nowadays, which will make my game get buried even if people are looking for it. And alternative spellings (someone suggested Pew Pue Pu) are just too weird.

Reginald McGillicutty blah blah blah....I love this one from author Jeffrey Aaron Miller. What disqualifies it is really the format of the game required for the game competition I'm hoping to enter with this. The requirements of the game use a NES cartridge format that's quite limited in video ROM, which means I have to share space between the title screen and gameplay.  Which means I can't spend a ton on a giant fancy title screen. (Unless I'm misunderstanding the specs of the format, which is quite possible).  

Which leaves Spacey McRacey. Which is what I'll go with for now until something changes my mind otherwise.

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Tonight's work was the "start game" screen (not the title screen), where players push start to register that they're in the game. (since it's a 4 player game).  Mostly, that involves drawing 4 big frames on the screen that each say "press start".  So I've been working on a reusable routine for drawing frames on the screen of arbitrary size and location.  

That's a task that should be pretty easy. But with the limitations of the 6502 combined with the oddities of how the NES handles background data updates, it's slightly more complicated that intuition would lead you to believe (to write any given chunk of background tiles, you have spend 4 instructions telling it what tile address you want to write to, then serially write data to a register, which is great for horizontal or vertical stripes, but annoying for an arbitrary rectangle in the middle of the screen, as you have to keep re-positioning the address register).

Anyway, it's getting there!

Rapid Progress

I told my office-mate that if I ever finished that background mess, I'd start making much faster progress.  And it turned out to be true.

Earlier this week, I decided it was time to look at audio engines. I understand the concept of how audio engines work on the nes, but I just don't want to take the time to build one myself.  After trying out a couple of them, I found one that integrated really easily, and lets you play music imported from the popular famitracker format. After digging around, I found some interesting famitracker compositions under a Creative Commons license from a guy that goes by Ozzed.net. Turned out to be a really nice guy and was helpful in providing me info to get some of his music integrated into the game. So now I have background music!

The next steps were collision checking, explosions, and player bullets. No problems there!  Most of that is pretty simple stuff, or would be in C. In assembly, it's a little more error-prone and slower-going, but not substantially more difficult: the logic is the same, but at a lower level. In just a few hours of work this week, I've those things all working!  (Well, there's still a bug where if a barrier's gap isn't aligned on a 16-pixel boundary, my collisions don't work quite right. Should be easy to fix though).

At this point, it's quickly starting to take shape!  I just need to add the points system, and suddenly the skeleton of the game is complete.  Then comes the fun part: adding the actual polish.

This includes:

1. Title screen and screen to select number of players
2. Sound effects
3. More interesting background graphics behind the barriers
4. Powerups
5. Different rounds with slightly different behavior

The last one needs a little more explanation.  The first round will be straightforward, with no tricks.  To keep it interesting, subsequent rounds will have a theme, such as:

• Speed round (everything is super fast)
• Battle round (the barriers are spaced out more easily, but everyone is maxed out with all sorts of weaponry, and you also gain points for kills)
• Collision round (touching other players kills you)
• Survival round (you lose points for dying)
• (and I'm trying to think of other similar ideas)

That all being said, send me ideas for a title. I'm serious, I need help with this.

PRGE, and I need a name

It's been awhile since I posted anything here!

First off, Anguna 2600 is pretty much done. I'm currently in the process of working on some promo material for the Portland Retro Game Expo, where we'll be showing off the game at the AtariAge booth.  I'm excited to be in a giant room full of people that are into retro-gaming, and have my game on display.  Should be a fun time.

I'm still slowly working on the nes game I talked about. I got hung up for awhile on displaying the barriers. I just kept running into bugs trying to get the game model to work right, then have it render properly based on the game model.  Part of it was scrolling -- the game has the appearance of scrolling through a world, but because the 6502 is only an 8-bit processor, I didn't feel like doing the math to track giant scroll values. So it's somewhat fake in terms of in-memory model.  The barriers move, the player stays motionless.  But because the nes background register is scrolling, (and it thinks that the top of the screen is 32 pixels off because of my top status bar), and because of mistakes I made while using fixed point path, and because the vertical resolution wraps at 240 pixels instead of the nice 256, I kept getting my math slightly off.

(it would have been easier if I just decided it scrolled 1 pixel per frame, so I'd know that every few frames, we'd hit an exact 8-pixel boundary, and would know to draw the next tiles. But because I'm scrolling by a variable amount (using fractional fixed-point math), it's more work to know when I cross that boundary.

Anyway, I FINALLY just threw away most of my background code and sat down with a pencil and paper and worked all the numbers out on paper, then re-coded it to match my paper-work. It worked much better when I did that.

Once that was out of the way (ok, I'm lying somewhat...I still have some issues with the background palettes, but I'll tackle that math later), I've finally got back to some of the game logic -- player collisions, etc. Fun stuff.  Today it was adding explosions and resetting the player position when you hit a wall:

It's actually started to vaguely resemble a real game at this point.

Next up: I need a title.  It's a party game with spaceships racing through barriers. My first thought was "Space Jam" until I remembered that that was that terrible movie with Michael Jordan. (Ok, I never saw it. Maybe it was actually awesome?)  I need a name.  And eventually a cool title screen to go with it.  Any suggestions?