Monday, October 3, 2016

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?

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