Finished world map

Well, I'm still making a few tweaks (the most recent was based on feedback that the off-centered sword was annoying, so I made the sword centered by default, but let you use the difficulty switches to change it back to the old off-centered setting), but thought I'd share the final finished world map:

Beta Testing Time!

Ok, Anguna 2600 is ready for some testing!  I'm looking for testers to try playing the game (either in an emulator, or on an actual Atari with a Harmony cart or similar device), and let me know what bugs and issues you find!

The main features aren't likely to change at this point, but I'm looking to fix any bugs and possibly tweak the game difficulty.

You can download the instruction manual and current build from this post on AtariAge.  Please email me (nathantolbert at gmail) or leave comments if you find any bugs or issues.  If you find any problems that I fix, I'll also credit you in the instruction manual if you'd like, if so, let me know how I should credit you.


Next steps:

• My friend Tim Lapetino, author of the upcoming Art of Atari book, is designing art for the cartridge label (hopefully to be re-used on the manual as well).
• I'll be updating the game and manual to fix any issues found during the beta test
• Hopefully later this fall, if all goes well, everything will be finished, and I'll do a cartridge release through the AtariAge store.

First full playthrough finished!

When I get near the end of a video game release, I have this phase. Where I play through the game, fix all the bugs I found, play through it again, fix all the bugs I found, play through it again....and so on....until I finally play through and don't find any new bugs.  (I've done this before)

It's somewhat miserable. But here we go again.

I finished the first full-playthrough tonight. Fixed a ton of bugs. Tomorrow I need to do another full playthrough, and then attempt a full playthrough on the actual Atari (which I'm not sure if I'll pull off, because my Atari controller is in poor enough shape that it will be really painful to go through the whole game!)

For anyone that wants to try the always-newest build and help me test, you can grab it from my jenkins server, which I'll be happy to email you the address to.....

Tons O Bugs

Well, my friend Daniel (AmishHack3r on Twitch) decided to give my game a try. And let me tell you folks, this guy is an amazing tester.

He found ALL SORTS of bugs for me. And diligently recorded video of each one, made drawings on a map of areas with glitches, and so on.  I couldn't ask for a better tester, thanks Daniel!

That being said, I have a lot to fix!

Getting close to done

I've been quiet here, because at any given point, playing Overwatch has sounded more fun than blogging about my game.

That being said, I've finished a preliminary "first draft" of the game, and on my first quarter of a playthrough, I've discovered quite a handful of little bugs. Mostly minor things (a couple screens where enemies glitch out, the reset switch not working exactly right, etc), but a few might take a little bit of work.

After this playthrough and testing round, then I get to play through it AGAIN, fixing any bugs along the way. When that's done, it's time for a sort of beta test, and hand it out to anyone willing to test it.  Once I get the bugs fixed that others discover, it's time to call it good!

Updated Map (Spoiler alert)

I've been chugging along filling out content, and getting really close to being finished!

Tonight I added a bunch more rooms, then realized that I really need a few more room layouts for variety. With some playing around, I was able to create 3 new room layouts using the existing graphic chunks, only rearranged slightly. So each of these layouts only requires 4 bytes of rom space each, instead of the 75 that I'd normally need!  I haven't added them in yet, I'll need to go back and replace some other rooms.

Until then, here's the current map! Just a few white spaces left to fill in!

Overworld finished!

As the title says, I finished the overworld tonight. 45 out of 196 rooms left to go (dungeons 4 and 5).

I don't have an updated map to show yet (I updated the engine by 1 scanline, so my new screenshots don't exactly match the old, I need to update my script that crops and adjusts them before I can get the new rooms on the graphical map).

I'm at the point now though, where every bug that gets fixed requires searching through old code to find places I can optimize a few bytes away. Fun times.