PC :: Boom bang a bang!

Yay! i didn't really get around to documenting any more of the process, but Vinculum has been released in it's "competition form" and i'm in the process of setting up a website for a new "venture"; to paraphrase the old bank advert where the businessman asks people at work, friends and everyone else apart from his wife before making a life-changing decision, i'm "going it alone" or more accurately i'm going to have a go at setting m'self up as an indie developer with this project in a greatly expanded form as a first product if all goes to plan. Anyway, my new website isn't actually there as such but the domain is working and theres a temporary page on it already for Vinculum with the instructions and a download link so off you go for a likkle look. And here's a screen of that latest revision:

PC :: i'm in the middle of a...

As usual, my sidetrack has become sidetracked... there's been a series of rapid prototyping sessions on the ShmupDev forums, each lasting a couple of weeks and with a theme set by the previous winner and i've been putting something together over the last day or so for the third of these sessions which has a theme based around chain reactions. The game in question is called Vinculum for a couple of reasons; partly because it's nice and spacey-sounding and that's a Good Thing for a shoot 'em up... but mostly its because "vinculum" means "that which unites or binds", like a chain and that's what the game is about.

The objective is simple, the player is assigned three standard issue spaceships with forward-firing lasers and nothing else, then sent into battle; blazing away works quite happily but is absolutely guaranteed to result in appalling scores. The secret to racking up the points lies in using the parting shots fired by the enemies against them, when a nasty is shot it explodes rather prettily and disgorges a ring of bullets and, whilst fatal to the player, they'll also blow up any other nasty they rip into. Since that's how chains are created, the true skill is to fire as little as possible and figure out the best ways to create chain reactions that do the rest of the work for you. Every shot the player fires decreases the chain multiplier, every nasty destroyed by a chain reaction adds to it and losing a life with reset the thing entirely. Here's how it looks, running in windowed mode:



Yeah... it's a little hectic, what has happened is a row of seven nasties all stacked up across the screen and i've shot the one on the left; that's blown up, peppered the nasty to it's right and so on until the second to last has just detonated and is about to blow the remaining nasty to kingdom come, all whilst i dodge like a lunatic between the bullets. Even at this stage of development with just five attack waves installed, Vinculum has been proving pretty good fun to play and i've been enjoying the testing, in part because i've been placing the waves in ways that i hope will require a little thought. All it really needs to be complete is a soundtrack (which i'm pretty sure i can sort out, i've been listening to the second level tune from Patriot Dark whilst testing things out) a little more presentation work and then i have to arrange lots of fairly intricate attack wave data... perhaps i need to think about an XML processor for the Alien Release Scheduling Engine's attack waves?

A8 :: Blending into the picture

Whoops, forgot to update the dev blog... i've had a bit of a "coders block" as Kenz put it, so there hasn't been any progress on the remaining couple of levels for Co-Axis 2189 - i know a few people are "champing at the bit" to play the thing (and everybody who had a go at Fusion seemed to enjoy themselves) but i'm fairly adamant that i'll get the bugger right before releasing the final version... that will be this year and hopefully next month at the latest, but in the meantime i've taken a few steps away from it to try clearing my head; to that end, i've been doing an Atari 8-bit puzzle game.

At the moment, it doesn't have an official name but it's pretty much based on the old MSN game Blender where pictures are displayed, then shuffled around and the player is tasked with chosing pairs of blocks to swap in order to get the original image back; right now i have the core of the code running, so single games can be played and the game knows when a picture has been restored and, since i'm not using a common or garden resolution for the pictures (more on that later when i have examples) there was a day of writing a converter in Blitz Max that takes bitmap files that adhere to certain rules and converts them into something my code can display. The "to do" list right now is getting a couple of pictures arranged (preferably three, i'm not sure why but two seems too little but three is enough... odd that), working on some compression to get everything wedged into the Atari and then building the presentation code around what is already there so that games go from title page to main game and back.

C64 :: Then there were three

There are now three levels all populated and playable; the "plan" involves attempting to get a fourth installed before Fusion and sending along a "Competition Edition" version of the game, then addding a stage or two more and releasing the final version.

C64 :: Two levels up!

Once more things are happening and i've now got two completely populated levels up and running (although they'll probably need a little more tuning for difficulty) and i've made a bit of a start on the third... but after spending most of the day naffing around with just shy of 600 lines of attack wave data (the combined length of all source files has passed the 5,200 line mark) it was pretty difficult to continue working on it without feeling the need to bounce my head off the monitor, so i took a "break" and wrote the end of level bonus screen instead and that third level will be started in earnest tomorrow. Here's all of the first level and the beginning of the second as a little bit of a teaser:



Now that there's a reasonable amount of level data in the game to test things properly, i'm quite surprised that nothing has turned out to be seriously broken! In fact, the only issue found is with the scoring system because, as it stands at least, there's absolutely no way it'll ever need an eight digit score! So i'm going to trim it down to six digits (which are just about being used if i turn off the collisions and try to trash everything within the existing levels) and that'll mean redesigning the status bar a little to make the boxes a bit smaller... so whilst i'm there, i might as well add a few other little cosmetic tweaks i wanted to do in the process...

C64 :: Making new worlds

Things are moving onwards... the first level of Co-Axis 2189 is now populated; i need to draw more nasties and change which objects are doing what, but the actual movements are all in and the shield strengths at least roughly tested to make sure the player has a reasonable chance of hitting about eighty or ninety percent of what's passing through with a bit of practice. i've started working on the second level and have some of the background graphics and tiles drawn - it still needs a lot more work and a fair bit of detail adding as well but i'm hoping to have something close to ready tomorrow and possibly even get a start on the attack patterns as well.

My plan is to have three levels done by the weekend and i'll put aside a copy of that version for release in case everything goes pear shaped and i run out of time; i'd like to try for five or six in total if there's enough time but the release date is a week on Saturday which means i need to be done and dusted around a week from Wednesday i reckon... [gulp]

C64 :: Presentation... its what you need

The last couple of days have seen a lot of small details that, whilst not blog-worthy in themselves have finally become something worth talking about; i've just finished integrating the titles and end screens into the game's source code - hat means it's starting to actually feel like a game now and, fingers crossed, there aren't any bugs in there that'll crop up as I begin to build and then populate the levels.

There are quite a few cosmetic details installed such as the status box on the score bar flashing up messages and having the name entry for the top score on the title page all in and working (although i'll be honest and admit the code driving that part of things is somewhat spaghetti-like in nature) and the fantastic music that was done for the iteration before last of this project by Matt Simmonds (nearly ten years ago now, the original Co-Axis 2189 was started eleven years after the original!) has been bolted into place along with volume fades as the code transitions from titles to game to completion and back.

In fact, if the entire thing is really working as well as it currently seems to be, that's the bulk of the code written so tomorrow should see the introduction of a few new tiles and characters for the first level and a start made on the look for the second which I already have a couple of ideas for. At the time of writing, the source code (including white space and comments) is just a fraction shy of 3,800 lines...