Richard's C64 game projects:
Time for the flight of your life
The Up in The Air Team
Richard Bayliss - Programming, compiling, disk/tape mastering, sound effects
Richard Bayliss / Andrew Fisher - Music
Wayne Womersley - Graphics and game project head gaffer
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Project cancelled
2nd
November
2009 – Build me power ups Richard (Wayne)
Hi there, just been reading the
diary of UITA, everything sounds like it is going well. I have sent
Richard some more suggestions and info regarding the game, he has come
up with some cool ideas himself. We have been discussing graphics
&
the player death sequence, hopefully all being well these new changes
should be implemented soon. I cant wait to see the new demo, oh yeah. I
have also discussed the power ups with him too, I think being able to
upgrade your weaponry would be quite nice, without giving too much away
upon completing two levels, parachutes containing weapons will
drop
from the sky. You will get to pick one only then continue on with your
mission, this gives the game a touch more strategy rather than just
blasting through level after level of enemies with the same basic
bullets you can choose from a missile type weapon, a smart bomb or just
choose an extra life to name but three of the weapons on
offer... Ha
Ha, I love it when a plan comes together!
Richard's bit. Ah, now I understand about the weaponry phase. I was a little confused when I sent him an email today, but now I am aware that what Wayne really wants for this title. Well, the idea is simple and I should hopefully be able to implement the weapon selection later on after I have finished all 20 levels. At the moment I am doing level 4 and later on this week I shall be working on the end of level boss for level 4. By the way, above is my latest video of the game in action.
10th November 2009 - Some new graphics (Richard)
Wayne has been really busy again finishing off or tweaking his graphics. Andrew emailed me a new .D64 which contained 3 files. One which was named "UITA". I am assuming that this one is the Sprites graphics. I took a look at all of the update sprites to see what was improved. I could not see much of what had been updated or improved. I noticed the explosion effect still has not been changed. So I decided to update the explosion sprites specially for myself and also to save Wayne the hassle and I saved the file as a new sprites work file.
Okay, now that was done. I took a look at the other 2 files, which Wayne and Andrew provided me with. I came across a file called "NU STATUS PANEL" and I came across the new status panel, which Wayne has drawn. It looks quite nice, but I feel that there is something wrong with the status panel. There is a large gap at the top of the status panel. Maybe some kind of decoration could be added to the top of the screen otherwise what Wayne has done is very good. Hmm, maybe a large propeller at the top of the panel and also some bolts at the side of each panel. Now that would make it more interesting. So I went into the font editor of the Firebird Graphics editor and I did a bit of drawing. I ended up with a propeller and also some bolts on the screen. I also updated the damage status bar as well. Wayne did a nice job with the status bar. I like what he done for the number of lives. He used a plane icon. It is a shame that we don't have an icon for balloons to collect, or fuel. But that is not really all that important. Plus the number of char sets is very limited. Anyway, here's my mock-up of the final design of the game's status bar.
I took a look at the final file, named "LEVEL 16", which shows level 16. It looks very nice and I hope I will be able to cram this one into the game, earlier or later on in 2010. Well, I am only doing a bit at a time. As now that I am working with my new job, I will be working on this project whenever I feel like it. It looks as if more work will be done on this game Thursday - Saturday this week. As I have been scheduled those 3 days off before I come into work on Sunday. :o)
12th November 2009 - More tweaking (Richard)
Well, it looks as if the status bar looks out of place so some tweaking is essential. I updated the propellor so that it is nice and central to the status bar. After that was done and I saved the final character set. I imported the new character set graphics into the project and assembled and tested the project. Oh dear me, it looks like the new character set update, which Wayne had done had messed up the level screen data, where the screen displays hell of a horrible mess between the clouds and other graphics. So now, I have another job, which is to fix this problem by loading the new character set into the level data files. Then compact them with Exomizer's level compression option and import the repacked data into the source code. I also noticed that Wayne deleted one of the essential chars for the third level, so I recreated the ground character from scratch.
Another problem which I came across was a simple one. The status characters were positioned elsewhere, apart from the score. So it was up to me to sort out the character values. I cheated doing this one way or another. I frozen the game with the Action Replay MK VI cartridge and used the screen editor option to locate the character position for where the numbers were. Then I updated the code. I also slowed the player down, because I had misunderstood one of Wayne's emails about the player's speed. He meant the player's animation speed, not the actual speed of the player. Hahahahah. Now everything looks much better so far. Hopefully I should get ready to create a new boss for the end of level 4 real soon.
14th November 2009 - Big balloons
Now I am ready to work on the end of level 4 boss stage. So before I can program the new boss stage, I will have to take a look at Wayne's SEUCK example to see how the giant balloon should move. According to the SEUCK example which Wayne has done. He wants the balloon to move up and down left and right by the SEUCK example. Unfortunately the SEUCK example has made things very difficult for me so I decided to try something myself. The balloon can go up and down back and forth. The SEUCK example also showed me that the balloon cannot shoot. So I guess that for this stage, the big balloon cannot shoot. Okay, I think I may have an interesting idea for this stage, but I won't be programming on it until Thursday or Friday this coming week. I've got work tomorrow and today I am a bit burnt out.
16th November 2009 - Some outstanding diary entries (Wayne)
O.k. went home and again ( again, again !!! ) updated the sprites, to be honest it was a quick 15 to 20 minutes of touching up/tweaking, I also did some work on the attack waves via SEUCK and also found a level I had designed previously, I compiled all these files and sent them off on a disk to Andrew to pass on to Richard!
Once again I Updated the character set, Richard is probably going to murder me for constantly updating the character set, hopefully this should be the last time I do this ( Honest Richard ) knocked up a new level, this is really nice and using the standard game character set, but I have added an extra layer of mountains, which will add a degree of extra detail, and mix things up in a nice way for the player. I Realized the Egyptian level I did previously is the wrong level number, I need to sit down and rejig the order and let richard know. Yikes! I am such a silly billy sometimes!
19th November 2009 - More outstanding diary entries (Richard)
Went to Wakefield home of the brilliant TEAM 17 who did all those cool AMIGA games in the 90s went in the NINJA GAMES shop and got some SNES games 3 quid a game bargain, First Samurai, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter 2 and Zero G? First Samurai is SO polished its unbelievable!
Nov 5th - My Birthday, Did plan to go to Meadhall but with going to Wakefield it knackered us out so we decided to go to Dewsbury instead again a good day, didn't get any games though :-< The independent shops there are expensive, especially for the Game Cube games, if you're after buying from a shop Wakefield CEX has great value GAMECUBE games!
Richard's bit. Ah, now I understand about the weaponry phase. I was a little confused when I sent him an email today, but now I am aware that what Wayne really wants for this title. Well, the idea is simple and I should hopefully be able to implement the weapon selection later on after I have finished all 20 levels. At the moment I am doing level 4 and later on this week I shall be working on the end of level boss for level 4. By the way, above is my latest video of the game in action.
10th November 2009 - Some new graphics (Richard)
Wayne has been really busy again finishing off or tweaking his graphics. Andrew emailed me a new .D64 which contained 3 files. One which was named "UITA". I am assuming that this one is the Sprites graphics. I took a look at all of the update sprites to see what was improved. I could not see much of what had been updated or improved. I noticed the explosion effect still has not been changed. So I decided to update the explosion sprites specially for myself and also to save Wayne the hassle and I saved the file as a new sprites work file.
Okay, now that was done. I took a look at the other 2 files, which Wayne and Andrew provided me with. I came across a file called "NU STATUS PANEL" and I came across the new status panel, which Wayne has drawn. It looks quite nice, but I feel that there is something wrong with the status panel. There is a large gap at the top of the status panel. Maybe some kind of decoration could be added to the top of the screen otherwise what Wayne has done is very good. Hmm, maybe a large propeller at the top of the panel and also some bolts at the side of each panel. Now that would make it more interesting. So I went into the font editor of the Firebird Graphics editor and I did a bit of drawing. I ended up with a propeller and also some bolts on the screen. I also updated the damage status bar as well. Wayne did a nice job with the status bar. I like what he done for the number of lives. He used a plane icon. It is a shame that we don't have an icon for balloons to collect, or fuel. But that is not really all that important. Plus the number of char sets is very limited. Anyway, here's my mock-up of the final design of the game's status bar.
I took a look at the final file, named "LEVEL 16", which shows level 16. It looks very nice and I hope I will be able to cram this one into the game, earlier or later on in 2010. Well, I am only doing a bit at a time. As now that I am working with my new job, I will be working on this project whenever I feel like it. It looks as if more work will be done on this game Thursday - Saturday this week. As I have been scheduled those 3 days off before I come into work on Sunday. :o)
12th November 2009 - More tweaking (Richard)
Well, it looks as if the status bar looks out of place so some tweaking is essential. I updated the propellor so that it is nice and central to the status bar. After that was done and I saved the final character set. I imported the new character set graphics into the project and assembled and tested the project. Oh dear me, it looks like the new character set update, which Wayne had done had messed up the level screen data, where the screen displays hell of a horrible mess between the clouds and other graphics. So now, I have another job, which is to fix this problem by loading the new character set into the level data files. Then compact them with Exomizer's level compression option and import the repacked data into the source code. I also noticed that Wayne deleted one of the essential chars for the third level, so I recreated the ground character from scratch.
Another problem which I came across was a simple one. The status characters were positioned elsewhere, apart from the score. So it was up to me to sort out the character values. I cheated doing this one way or another. I frozen the game with the Action Replay MK VI cartridge and used the screen editor option to locate the character position for where the numbers were. Then I updated the code. I also slowed the player down, because I had misunderstood one of Wayne's emails about the player's speed. He meant the player's animation speed, not the actual speed of the player. Hahahahah. Now everything looks much better so far. Hopefully I should get ready to create a new boss for the end of level 4 real soon.
14th November 2009 - Big balloons
Now I am ready to work on the end of level 4 boss stage. So before I can program the new boss stage, I will have to take a look at Wayne's SEUCK example to see how the giant balloon should move. According to the SEUCK example which Wayne has done. He wants the balloon to move up and down left and right by the SEUCK example. Unfortunately the SEUCK example has made things very difficult for me so I decided to try something myself. The balloon can go up and down back and forth. The SEUCK example also showed me that the balloon cannot shoot. So I guess that for this stage, the big balloon cannot shoot. Okay, I think I may have an interesting idea for this stage, but I won't be programming on it until Thursday or Friday this coming week. I've got work tomorrow and today I am a bit burnt out.
16th November 2009 - Some outstanding diary entries (Wayne)
O.k. went home and again ( again, again !!! ) updated the sprites, to be honest it was a quick 15 to 20 minutes of touching up/tweaking, I also did some work on the attack waves via SEUCK and also found a level I had designed previously, I compiled all these files and sent them off on a disk to Andrew to pass on to Richard!
Once again I Updated the character set, Richard is probably going to murder me for constantly updating the character set, hopefully this should be the last time I do this ( Honest Richard ) knocked up a new level, this is really nice and using the standard game character set, but I have added an extra layer of mountains, which will add a degree of extra detail, and mix things up in a nice way for the player. I Realized the Egyptian level I did previously is the wrong level number, I need to sit down and rejig the order and let richard know. Yikes! I am such a silly billy sometimes!
19th November 2009 - More outstanding diary entries (Richard)
Went to Wakefield home of the brilliant TEAM 17 who did all those cool AMIGA games in the 90s went in the NINJA GAMES shop and got some SNES games 3 quid a game bargain, First Samurai, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter 2 and Zero G? First Samurai is SO polished its unbelievable!
Nov 5th - My Birthday, Did plan to go to Meadhall but with going to Wakefield it knackered us out so we decided to go to Dewsbury instead again a good day, didn't get any games though :-< The independent shops there are expensive, especially for the Game Cube games, if you're after buying from a shop Wakefield CEX has great value GAMECUBE games!
November 19th, this week I have been working on SEUCK attack waves
again, tweaking and changing and generally adjusting things to
get
them right for the final game! These are proving slightly trickier than
I had foreseen. I was reading the diary at the weekend, Richard saying
he might not be able to do all the 20 levels and only be able to do
16-Aaaargh - NO! I had spent blinkin' ages working out and planning a
correct order for the attack waves in the game, I feel as if the carpet
has been pulled from under me. I know Richard only has limited memory
so I need to have a serious rethink, certain sacrifices need to be made
if I am to try and get 20 levels in the game! Anyway I noticed Richard
has tweaked the status panel this is superb! Impressive, its funny how
adding a few "screws" and a plane propellor have beefed up the
presentation. I have had a couple of extra ideas for the status panel
myself... These graphics are taking much longer than I had anticipated
still this is one of the joys of doing this as a hobby, you don't have
deadlines! Having read Andrew Fishers recent Ben Daglish Feature in
RETRO GAMER magazine it got me thinking wondered if Andrew had
composed anything previously that I might be able to use in the game
and hence remove some composing time from him- I dug out an old (!)
1999 disk and waded in unfortunately had no joy. However I did find
tunes for my next two games WIZARDS AND WARLOCKS (SPOOKY!) and the
lovely BOUNCY CARS (INTERSTATE). I did wonder if I could ask Andrew for
a particular style of music - is UP IN THE AIR a Hubbard style sort of
tune, A Daglish tune or perhaps a Galway sort of tune? Hmmm, Im going
to keep my nose out ( for once! ) and trust him, the tune of his we
were using in an early demo of the game was lovely and just suited the
mood of the game nicely, I do hope he can do more tunes like that! Go
Andrew! :->
24th November 2009 - Enter the big balloon (Richard)
I have been rotared a day off work today. So as I had nothing else to do. I decided to do a little more on Level 4 of UITA. This time the end of level boss. Wayne drew three sprites, which was to form a giant hot air balloon, with someone on board. So I worked on programming the giant thing. First of all. I had to set up the correct values for the X/Y sprite expansions. I needed to set the value for where the 3 visible enemy sprites can be expanded by X and Y axis so that I got a huge hot air balloon. Unfortunately it took some time to work out the poke value for $D017 and $D01D but thankfully I got a positive result. The sprites were still out of place, so I had to update the default start position for those sprites and then got everything fitted in quite nicely.
Now there's something missing. Enemy movements. So I set up the movement pointers for the huge balloon, so that it could move both X and Y directions. Yet again, just like the bird boss. I got the huge balloon moving literally the same way, except for instead of moving to a portion of the game's screen. The sprite movement goes across the whole screen inside the game area and then turns back. I'm pretty happy with this one so far. It makes the player have to dodge the balloon as well as shooting it. Which makes this level a challenge. The balloon does not shoot, unlike the big bird. But I don't think the balloon would need to shoot anyway.
Although I got the big balloon in action. There seems to be a case where during the boss stages, whenever the player loses a life, when it comes back to the boss stage. The boss appears from nowhere, and the sprite positions had not been set as default. So I updated the Get Ready settings to set-up the end of level boss in the default starting position, so that nothing goes all over the place. Thankfully it worked. There was just one more thing for me to do before I confirm that the boss stage is done. What is it? To update the collision routines of course. This is so that whenever the player shoots any of the three sprites during this level, the routine records a collision for the whole enemy itself. Now everything's working how it should. Fantastic. Hopefully on to level 5 next week - depending on the type of shift patterns I have at work and which days I am rotared off, unless I'm called in for some reason.
30th November 2009 - (Wayne)
Diary Time - in the last thrilling instalment the extremely weird but fantastic(!) Wayne was working on an 8 Bit game that had turned into a Monster otherwise known as UP IN THE AIR! Lets see what he has been up to... After three weeks of intense work I have finally done the level 10 through to level 16 attack waves using SEUCK, am very pleased with my efforts, I also decided to add sound effects to the enemies too this should make it easier for Richard/Andrew to add to the final game... I also returned to the STATUS PANEL, in my excitement I had forgotten to add a helicopter to the status panel. I also decided to add a balloon character instead of having the word "BALLOON" in the status panel, its a silly little addition but I am proud of it. This means a huge chunk of UITA is now complete, am hoping to receive the demo that Richard did for me 5 days ago sometime this week courtesy of Andrew Fisher, I am hoping to speak to him regarding the level complete music this week if I get time... I still don't have the artwork for the cover of the game I was expecting, this is causing me great worry and concern, am going to have a word with the person responsible for creating the artwork this week...
24th November 2009 - Enter the big balloon (Richard)
I have been rotared a day off work today. So as I had nothing else to do. I decided to do a little more on Level 4 of UITA. This time the end of level boss. Wayne drew three sprites, which was to form a giant hot air balloon, with someone on board. So I worked on programming the giant thing. First of all. I had to set up the correct values for the X/Y sprite expansions. I needed to set the value for where the 3 visible enemy sprites can be expanded by X and Y axis so that I got a huge hot air balloon. Unfortunately it took some time to work out the poke value for $D017 and $D01D but thankfully I got a positive result. The sprites were still out of place, so I had to update the default start position for those sprites and then got everything fitted in quite nicely.
Now there's something missing. Enemy movements. So I set up the movement pointers for the huge balloon, so that it could move both X and Y directions. Yet again, just like the bird boss. I got the huge balloon moving literally the same way, except for instead of moving to a portion of the game's screen. The sprite movement goes across the whole screen inside the game area and then turns back. I'm pretty happy with this one so far. It makes the player have to dodge the balloon as well as shooting it. Which makes this level a challenge. The balloon does not shoot, unlike the big bird. But I don't think the balloon would need to shoot anyway.
Although I got the big balloon in action. There seems to be a case where during the boss stages, whenever the player loses a life, when it comes back to the boss stage. The boss appears from nowhere, and the sprite positions had not been set as default. So I updated the Get Ready settings to set-up the end of level boss in the default starting position, so that nothing goes all over the place. Thankfully it worked. There was just one more thing for me to do before I confirm that the boss stage is done. What is it? To update the collision routines of course. This is so that whenever the player shoots any of the three sprites during this level, the routine records a collision for the whole enemy itself. Now everything's working how it should. Fantastic. Hopefully on to level 5 next week - depending on the type of shift patterns I have at work and which days I am rotared off, unless I'm called in for some reason.
30th November 2009 - (Wayne)
Diary Time - in the last thrilling instalment the extremely weird but fantastic(!) Wayne was working on an 8 Bit game that had turned into a Monster otherwise known as UP IN THE AIR! Lets see what he has been up to... After three weeks of intense work I have finally done the level 10 through to level 16 attack waves using SEUCK, am very pleased with my efforts, I also decided to add sound effects to the enemies too this should make it easier for Richard/Andrew to add to the final game... I also returned to the STATUS PANEL, in my excitement I had forgotten to add a helicopter to the status panel. I also decided to add a balloon character instead of having the word "BALLOON" in the status panel, its a silly little addition but I am proud of it. This means a huge chunk of UITA is now complete, am hoping to receive the demo that Richard did for me 5 days ago sometime this week courtesy of Andrew Fisher, I am hoping to speak to him regarding the level complete music this week if I get time... I still don't have the artwork for the cover of the game I was expecting, this is causing me great worry and concern, am going to have a word with the person responsible for creating the artwork this week...
Crossing my fingers that Richard can change the colour on one of
the hang gliders on level 3 - one of the colours looks a bit poor, its
a silly thing but it is annoying me, Its funny how you can plan these
things but until you see them up and running on screen you don't know
how
they are going to turn out. I do wonder if I have been crotchety
cos
my
carpol tunnel is still giving me hell?
End Of Diary!
Thank you for sticking with the project, despite my pain I have
really tried to push myself and give 110% for the project, I hope you
guys (you and Andrew!) appreciate it!
3rd December 2009 - Enter the Cube (Wayne)
Today I have been to Leeds, there is a lovely old fashioned german market there for christmas, bought some donuts ( naughty boy! ) and various bits and bats, generally had a good time then went to CEX and bought some Gamecube games and a Futurama boxset too! Good Times! News on the game artwork. I have two people doing work for me this is because I thought the original artist had deserted the project, this however has changed and she approached me to let me know she would be doing some work on it over the weekend. Also earlier in the week one of the other women I worked with offered to have a crack at doing some artwork for the game and I said yes. This is good news, one because I have two possible pieces of artwork to choose from and two because I can always draw one or both of these for an extra file/s for the disk version. This will be my next headache, what do we fill the final disk version with? The finished UITA game will not fill a disk on its own, hmm, will have to think about that... When I do get the artwork my task will be to convert it, when I have finished I will allow Richard permission to show it on the web site! I love the demo that is currently up and running, he has done the plane death sequence just as I imagined it - Fabulous!
6th December - Short break - Back in 2010 (Richard)
I have decided to give this project a break until the new year, as I am working on a special release which I am aiming to get done in time for Christmas.
10th December 2009 - Bye Bye Black Bird (Wayne)
Well this week has been rather cool and groovy- I got the latest version of UITA off the rather wonderful human being otherwise known as Andrew Fisher! I had a quick play and must say UITA is shaping up to be a rather nice game indeed. I sat and played through, level one is lovely, level 2 with my new adjusted magpies looks lovely, then I reached the first end of level baddie, which is a hulking great black bird, NO NO naughty I didn't want a black bird, A quick press of the action replay, a search through the code and bye bye black bird! ( a bit of a cliché but I thought it was funny!) I changed it to brown-Mmm much more sexy ( if you can have sexy sprites that is ). Level 3 has the lovely gliders and then we have the challenging level 4 with the mini basket balloons ( Please can we change the colours of the mini basket balloons Richard (Yes, but we can talk about it in the new year)? Yellow and Dark Blue don't seem to work for me sorry ). Then its the BIG AND BEEFY Basket Balloon, Richard has expanded this in the x and y registers to create a monster balloon, its created with 3 sprites, two for the balloon bit and one for the actual basket bit. This is a bit strange for me because I actually didn't want it quite so big, this again is my fault, I created the Graphics in Firebird Graphic Editor and just assumed when I sent them to Richard that he would just duplicate what he saw in the editor in the game, hmm, sorry Richard, oh well it is my fault and these are tiny niggles in what is shaping up to be a nice shoot em up.Thank you Richard and Andrew, you guys rock! I also got the Wigmore Artist this week ( Thank you again andrew ), its the utility art package I use to draw bitmaps, during my C64 career I have drawn over a 100 Bitmaps! Why not checkout the MR MEN SLIDE SHOW, THE SOUTH PARK SLIDE SHOW or the STAR WARS SLIDE SHOW, all collaborations with my old friend ( well he's not that old really giggle )? There are many out there advanced art studio, koala pad, blah blah, I just personally prefer Wigmore Artist, despite searching at home I had had no luck in finding it, I suspect its out in the garage after the upheaval earlier on in the year, but thank to Andrew I now have it again so when I get some artwork I can draw the title screen etc.
17th December 2009 - SEUCK it to me (Wayne)
Hello there, well after waiting for quite a while for both artists I decided to have a bash at doing the graphics for the title screen myself, I have drawn the plane, some clouds and a balloon, not much but in the space of two days its quite good for me. Trivia: Did you know how this game came about? I played the game KIKSTART on the Commodore 16 in the mid 80s, the game contains balloons and I thought it would be great to have a game that required you to collect balloons as an integral part of the game. Last year I was sat in my bedroom bored and started tinkering with the Firebird Graphic Editor with the intention of creating a game with RICHARD although I had not even asked him at this point! After seeing SUB HUNTER I thought it would be nice to do something with clouds and parallax scrolling that scrolled the traditional way for a scroller on the C64. Two/Three months later I had created what would be the template graphics for UP IN THE AIR. Andrew Fisher very kindly converted these to Sideways SEUCK and I knocked up a VERY early draft of UP IN THE AIR, not long after this Richard came onboard and then ever since we have had the online diary! Fun huh! Bye for now dudes...
25th December 2009 - ?Load, Error, Ready. (Wayne)
Surprise dudes! I wasn't expecting to get chance but here I am at the keys again. Last week I managed to begin drawing the Loading Screen ( although this may only be for the disk version as a disk filler, it depends how much memory Richard has left in the game when he has finished ). I had to tweak ( no change there then ! ) and mess with one or two things but its looking rather good now, may have a look tonight or tomorrow and do some more work on it. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.
Today I played out with the dog and also played inside on my GAME CUBE - STAR FOX ADVENTURES is truly amazing!!! Hopefully in the new year I will send the UITA artwork on to Richard and I give him my permission to display my BITMAP picture on this website! Bye for now! Best Wishes for an Awesome 2010!
7th January 2010 - Hey Ma, I'm drawing a loading picture. (Wayne)
Well After what seems like an eternity I finally finished my BITMAP screen for UITA! If I can push myself I will get this sent over to Andrew this week. Now I am sat twiddling my thumbs, or am I? Erm the answer is NO, because UITA is going to be on Disk as well as Tape I thought it would be nice to have a disk filler or two so I have begun drawing some graphics for a small space shoot em up, My girlfriend likes shoot em ups so I decided to do this as a bit of a giggle for her-well that is if Richard likes my graphics and also if he doesn't mind doing a shoot em up ( cue sounds of Richard picking up a hatchet and lobbing my head off giggle ) to go on the UITA disk. Regarding UITA, Towards the back end of last year Richard did mention to me that he may not be able to fit all of the game in to one load, my thoughts on that are this - either try and cram everything in(!) to one load and make sacrifices or do 10 levels per load, that way the tape version could have levels 1 to 10 on Side A and 11 to 20 on Side B, perhaps the second batch of levels could have a password system to allow access to them. Oh by the way, on a totally unrelated matter I have been working on the Sprite graphics for CAMELS IN SPACE 2 on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week LOVE MY COMMODORE 64!!!!!!
17th January 2010 - Hang over (Richard)
Oh dear, I have been up the pub last night with my mum, my dad and my sister's husband's dad. We had quite a bit of a drinking session last night. I only lasted up to 4 pints of Fosters and they lasted up to 6. Man my head still hurts a bit today. BUT THAT WILL NOT PUT ME OFF WITH THIS GAME PROJECT. I don't feel too bad now, unlike I was very early in the morning.
Since my Christmas break, writing Bah, Humbug! and also programming a couple of C64 utilities (I was going to write another Sideways scrolling SEUCK game, but didn't at the end) and also working 6 days in a row in one week twice over the Christmas period. So today I am back to pick up the pieces from where I was last left off. It didn't take me that long to remember. I only had to do a little thing, which was change the colour of the boss balloon. I used a pink balloon and yellow basket. Wayne wanted me to change the colour to the balloon that was showed in the SEUCK example I was given by Andrew a few weeks or months back. Got it sorted :o) I took a look at Wayne's new status bar for the game. It looks good, but for now I shall leave that until last. I have the main game to work on before graphics enhancements. Anyway after I saw the message added above the status bar. It sort of made me laugh :o). Oh yes, it sure did make me laugh. Here's exactly what the message read out:
OH MY GOD! WAYNE IS A C64 GENIUS! LOL
IT'S THE NEW UP TO DATE STATUS PANEL
LOOK AT THE LOVELY HELICOPTER IN THE
STATUS PANEL!
I'VE EVEN UPDATED THE BALLOONS BIT TOO!
IT'S 1:23AM ON THE 21ST OF NOV 2009
NOTE TO RICHARD. PROBABLY BEST IF YOU
DON'T SCROLL THIS BIT -CHORTLE- THESE
ARE THE DUMBEST LEVEL GRAPHICS IN A GAME
EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :-)
Well, why would I want to use the text as the scrolling background graphics? Actually I just could not resist the temptation into to doing exactly that, but you gamers would not want to see that in the game would you? Nope, I thought not. :o)
Anyway, I went back to the SEUCK level examples to see what level 5 looks like and how the enemies should move. Oh no. I've got a bit of a challenge for this one. The enemies for this stage are thunder clouds. Which means that those objects will have to shoot. That means that I will have to program some more routines to allow the thunder clouds to shoot. I'll work on this next week, because of my slight hangover :o).
23rd January 2010 - Level 5 in the works (Richard)
Well, it was meant to have been yesterday, but I just did not have the motivation to do more, so I decided to work on parts of level 5 today. First of all, I had to set up the colour table settings for this level, also set up the enemy types for this level. Wayne emailed me to let me know that the thunder clouds should shoot the lightning bolts and should not allow the player to shoot at the clouds as this would be very unrealistic. Bah, that spoils the fun, but it must be done. Before I could do any of this, I set up the colour scheme for level 5 (Wayne, are you sure you want a cyan sky with medium grey thunder clouds? I think a black sky would probably be just right for this level. I have not changed the colour scheme for this level.
After setting up the parameters and level settings for the game, I got exomizer to decrunch level 5's background, but the result looked really ugly. It appeared to be the case where the graphics was drawn with an older character set and later graphics used the empty or used characters which were supposed to form a nice background. Unfortunately, little does Wayne realize is that level 5's cloud background will need a good tidy up. I can tidy everything up on screen as soon as main the game engine is finally finished. So for now, I used level 1's background for this level for the time being. Just look at level 5's screen. Eurgh!
Now that the worst bits are over. It is time for me to get those clouds moving and strike thunder. The best way for this level will be to make the lightning go downwards but move across the screen as well. Well, I have done this, but it still does not seem to be right at the moment. I can't be asked to do any more tweaking of this game today, maybe some other time when I get the time and motivation for it.
A couple of outstanding entries from Wayne here today. Sadly I did not get round to adding those 2 diary entries until today. I got a bit carried away writing a brand new game for Digital Talk and the Retro Vision 2010 convention (Sadly I will not be there) so there's not much of an update this week. I should hopefully be back on to this game some time this weekend or maybe next week. :o)
28th January 2010 - UITA Artwork received (Wayne)
lda .LEVEL
cmp #$05 ;If level 5
bne .NotLevel5
lda LightningobjectX
cmp InsideGameScreen
bcs NotInsideGameScreen
lda LightningobjectY
cmp YpositionLimit
bcc .NotReachedLimit
jsr .ResetLightning
rts
;Continue main movement routine
.....
.Resetlightning
lda CloudObjectX
sta LightningObjectX
lda CloudObjectY
sta LightningObjectY
rts
My theory sort of worked, but I still came across another problem with the cloud behaviour. For some reason, the lightning seems to pause a little before going down more and then after reaching the Y position of #$CA it just stays there until off screen. This was something I did not want to see so now, time to keep tweaking the movement routine until I get it correct. Bah! Well, I deleted a few unecessary routines and added one or two to check the range of where the sprites are, but at the moment it is looking a little much better, but there is still some tweaking required for the lightning. At last. It's done.
Now my next task is to disable the player from shooting exclusively for this stage. Then fingers crossed, level 5 is finished. I have to be informed whether it is finished or not before I move on to level 6. LOL! Actually, by the time you are reading this thingy, the task has been done.
10th February 2010 (15th February 2010) - SEUCK High Jinks
Again I have been playing Luigis Mansion, what a brilliant game, it gave me an idea for a C64 game but I shall put that on the back burner for a while... O.K. so what have I done this week, well... I had done some graphics for a silly little shoot em up, I sent them on to Richard via Andrew in the hope that Richard might do something with them, he emailed me back last week saying he is busy with UITA, ok, this is not a problem. I loaded up my version of the sprites converted them over to SEUCK, loaded Seuck and after two sittings over two days- "ZIP ZAP ZOP" is born! Also I was playing the Activision Anthology for the Playstation 2 ( fantastic retro gaming- its an Atari 2600 compilation ! ) last week at my good friend Pauls. One game in particular caught my eye -"HIJINKS". So I have begun work on a SEUCK style "HIJINKS" game with differences of course, I dont fancy ATARI suing me... Its only going to be simple game, but a nice little addition to the disk version... And yes I still need to do that blinking Disk menu and write the instruction manual out... On a plus note I have contacted Richard and he gives permission to release his latest version of BOMBCHASE on to CARTRIDGE and I have also asked about releasing UP IN THE AIR on Cartridge and he said yes to that too. YIPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! ( Wayne is excited C64 fans !!!!!!!! ) So we can now officially announce UITA is going to come on TAPE/DISK and ( RGCD People willing ) CARTRIDGE too-Mmmm nice! See you soon!
Note: This entry has been published on to the TND web site, a few days later as I have been ill between 8th February 2010 - 11th February 2010. I finally recovered from a nasty cold last night. So fingers crossed, another update later on this week - Richard.
21st February 2010 - Send in the choppers (Richard)
Although I have started working on Bionik Granny Returns on Friday, I have decided to do some more UITA programming today. Well, the start of level 6 of course. It seems that the SEUCK example, which Wayne provided me, only had a boss plane for level 6 and the Sideways SEUCK game preview which I saw had helicopters. So I am assuming that for this stage, the enemies are to be helicopters. Hang on. Helicopters are probably not enough for this stage, so I decided to add some spinning enemy stunt planes as well. Both enemies need a certain number of hits before they are destroyed. So I set the hit counter to 5 before they all blow to smithereens. Wahey! I think level 6 is starting to come out quite nicely. I will still need to do a boss stage for this level, but that can wait until later on this week (or next). I am pleased with the progress with it so far. Pictured below is level 6. I will not be showing many pictures for this game project.
21st February 2010 - SEUCK it to me (Wayne)
28th March 2010 - Flying for freedom (Wayne)
I have now completed and passed on FLIGHT OF FREEDOM to Andrew ( And Richard ) also check out SEUCK VAULT for a free download special remix of FLIGHT OF FREEDOM- my gift to all you lovely people waiting for UITA :-> Have now started the menu for the disk version of UITA, its looking nice... :->
29th March 2010 - My head hurts - episode 2 (Wayne)
4th April - Enter the Gyrocopters (Richard)
Well, not much today. I have added the Gyrocopters into level 6. Level 5 still needs a lot of tweaking, but to be honest. I haven't been very well this weekend, yet another nasty cold has hit me.
10th April 2010 - Struck by Lightning - again (Richard)
Oh man, not Level 5 again. I'm finding this stage to be rather annoying to program. I just could not seem to get that darn lightning shooting right one bit the past times I did this game. Oh well, today I had another kind of brainwave to try and solve this dreaded and rather annoying problem. The trick is to create some values so that one cloud will shoot lightning, while the other two clouds *share* the other lightning bolt sprite. Therefore in theory, one sprite fires lightning constantly, while other clouds fire it once at a time. It would make the level much easier, but I can't use more than 8 sprites in this game, as multiplexing sprites is damn right too difficult for me to get to grips with.
So I created some new labels/variables that can be used to try and shoot lightning one at a time. The labels are Lightning1Set, Lightning2Set and CloudChoice. Where the "Get Ready" screen starts. I automatically Zero the Lightning perameters. Then inside the enemy logic source code I added a simple routine which was:
lda Lightning1Set
cmp #$01
beq .NotCloudStage1
lda CloudChoice
cmp #0
beq .SetOnCloud1
cmp #1
beq .SetOnCloud3
.NotCloudStage1 rts ;Error!
.SetOnCloud1
lda objpos+$05
sta objpos+$07
lda objpos+$04
sta objpos+$06
lda #1
sta Lightning1Set
lda #1
sta CloudChoice
rts
.SetOnCloud3
lda objpos+$0d
sta objpos+$07
lda objpos+$0c
sta objpos+$06
lda #1
sta Lightning1Set
lda #0
sta CloudChoice
rts
After entering this I assembled, compacted and executed the game in WinVice. Unfortunately, there was still a problem in the code. For some silly reason the lightning from one of the clouds just gets stuck for some reason. I have just realised what I have done wrong. I have forgotten to switch off the "Lightning1Set" label after the lightning has finished moving off screen.
After assembling and test running the source. All three clouds are able to fire lightning, however, there is still a slight couple of snags. The first one of which is that the lightning from cloud 2 constantly causes problems. I have a small theory in which could probably solve this little problem. And that is to do exactly the same type of routine as what was used with the previous lightning routine. Now I assemble, compact and run the game again. What would the result be like this time round I wonder? Well, the firing routine seems to work much better, but there's still a silly error in the game code. Lightning is still appearing from nowhere. Finally, it's working.
My step was to alter the lightning so that it will appear right in the middle of the clouds. Just a simple little ADC value will do the trick quite niceley. So I added before positioning the lightning sprites, LDA CLOUD_POSITION : CLC : ADC #$04 : STA LIGHTNING_POSITION :) Easy.
If I remember correctly, Wayne wanted me to remove the player/enemy collision routine where the clouds stage occur. Therefore if the player hits a cloud, there is no collision found. Well, at least that is something simple for me to master :) Consider it done.
Well, that will do for today as I am going out this afternoon. It is such a wonderful sunny day - Pub weather :) 'Til next time :o)
11th April 2010 - A new tune for the game (Richard)
Because of the problems with the previous music editor I used to compose music for this game. I decided to use Goat Tracker V2.68 and write some new music for the game. So I done 6 tunes. The first tune is the title music. The second was the in game music, then level complete ditty, followed by the Game Over ditty. Then the boss stage music finishing with the game complete tune. The music is exactly the same as the one I used for the original game, except for some additional changes which I made. After composing the music, I added
The tunes sounded pretty great for the game, much better than the version I composed using EMS V7.03 - Plus the music size is more optimized. I also added some nice effects to the music as well, which would suit this game quite nicely. Finally I imported the music into the game source code :o)
22nd April 2010 - Burnt Out! (Wayne)
Well again I feel like it has been yonks since I was here typing anything. I have nearly nailed the Disk Menu ( currently on version 4 ! ) and I have also been working on 3 SEUCK games. One of them is a surprise for Richard for his website, but I shall also be allowing Andrew to distribute it through SEUCKVAULT.com I also intend remixing ZIP ZAP ZOP as Richard didnt feel the original was substantial enough, this will now be called ZAP ZOP ZIP and will be a freebie for you disk users out there who buy the UITA disk version. I am also working on Wheelspin-a car game which will be the prototype for a game I started working on 3 years ago called BOUNCY CARS. I have a feeling that SEUCK has re-entered my life in a big way again!!! Had a major setback last week, while working on the game for Richard, I had a smell of paint for quite a while and chose to ignore it, I went to save it and everything went dead, it turns out my powerpack had burned out and died-DAMN YOU POWERPACK!!! Anyway, the good news my friend Paul lent me his, and the fantastic Andrew Fisher got me one sent to my house this week-FAB stuff!!! I also got the new demo of UITA this week, I have just emailed Richard about this now, things are coming along brilliantly, Level 5 is NEARLY there and Level 6 needs a little tweaking, am getting excited (again !!! ) :-> There have also been discussions about the disk/tape loader I want to do some retro type thing in the style of US GOLD, I did plan to do a UK GOLD loader but I had neglected to remember the UK GOLD channel - DOH!!! This would probably cause copyright infringements so we wont be doing that. Maybe we could do a "64 UK" loader with God save the Queen as the loading music (No way, I have something better and fancier in store - Rich). , what do you lot think? ( I Think Iam a genius - LOL )
13th May 2010 - A SEUCKer on Holiday (Wayne)
Well, after the Sideways scrolling SEUCK compo 2010 prizes. I am finally ready to return to Up in the Air. Wayne got back to me a few weeks ago, regarding the enemies in level 6. He was quite pleased with level 6 so far, but there was still something missing. Wayne wanted the Gyrocopters to be able to shoot bullets. As I don't have knowledge about sprite multiplexors, I came up with an easier option, which is to make the last enemy sprite the bullet. So I took a look at the command tables for level 6, and zeroed the up and down control for enemy 5 so that it will move across, like a bullet. I also changed the frame for enemy 5 so that the enemy is of course a bullet. After a test run, I could see only 2 gyrocopters and 3 bullet sprites. Oops, ah well. I know what I done there, so I altered the level 6 startup parameters so that there are 4 Gyrocopters and one double bullet. After another test run I see 4 Gyrocopters and one bullet. Fantastic. Now it's up to me to make this bullet shoot out of a Gyrocopter after it leaves the border on the left.
I created a new label value, which is called .Sprite5IsBullet and for levels 1 - 5, I set .Sprite5IsBullet to be zero, and for level 6 .Sprite5IsBullet to be one. I assembled to check for errors. Thankfully, there were no errors during assembly. So now that I am happy with the label. It is time for me to add some new routines into the enemy sprite movement and enemy 5 sprite collision routine - depending on whether or not the sprite is a bullet. I added a little test bullet sprite routine, to make things quite more effective, so that the bullet object moves at the speed of '3'. I assembled the routine. Then I test run it. Seems to work okay. Then I added some additional routines that will correspond to the sprite that checks for which sprite can fire the bullet after the bullet has left the screen. I assembled the source - no errors. Then run the program again in WinVice to see what's happened this time round. I got all chosen sprites in the routine to fire bullets. BRILLIANT. Now all I need to do is disable the player being able to kill sprite 5 with it's bullets, and hopefully level 6 is finished - apart from the boss stage which needs to be added some time next week. Oh hang on, I have already done that :o)
20th May 2010 - SEUCK (Wayne)
This mornming I woke up at 6.30 ish ( dont know why ) after lying there a while I decided to do some work on the SEUCK game that I wish to include on the UITA disk, I think another week of work and this should be done! Also done more work on my other SEUCK game-WHEELSPIN, this now has four levels. Am trying to make sure that it contains differences to the final version that will become BOUNCY CARS. Am off back to Dewsbury today to see if I can get some more SNES games!!! God am such a geek LOL! :-> Gonna work on some more levels for UITA next week I think...
3rd December 2009 - Enter the Cube (Wayne)
Today I have been to Leeds, there is a lovely old fashioned german market there for christmas, bought some donuts ( naughty boy! ) and various bits and bats, generally had a good time then went to CEX and bought some Gamecube games and a Futurama boxset too! Good Times! News on the game artwork. I have two people doing work for me this is because I thought the original artist had deserted the project, this however has changed and she approached me to let me know she would be doing some work on it over the weekend. Also earlier in the week one of the other women I worked with offered to have a crack at doing some artwork for the game and I said yes. This is good news, one because I have two possible pieces of artwork to choose from and two because I can always draw one or both of these for an extra file/s for the disk version. This will be my next headache, what do we fill the final disk version with? The finished UITA game will not fill a disk on its own, hmm, will have to think about that... When I do get the artwork my task will be to convert it, when I have finished I will allow Richard permission to show it on the web site! I love the demo that is currently up and running, he has done the plane death sequence just as I imagined it - Fabulous!
6th December - Short break - Back in 2010 (Richard)
I have decided to give this project a break until the new year, as I am working on a special release which I am aiming to get done in time for Christmas.
10th December 2009 - Bye Bye Black Bird (Wayne)
Well this week has been rather cool and groovy- I got the latest version of UITA off the rather wonderful human being otherwise known as Andrew Fisher! I had a quick play and must say UITA is shaping up to be a rather nice game indeed. I sat and played through, level one is lovely, level 2 with my new adjusted magpies looks lovely, then I reached the first end of level baddie, which is a hulking great black bird, NO NO naughty I didn't want a black bird, A quick press of the action replay, a search through the code and bye bye black bird! ( a bit of a cliché but I thought it was funny!) I changed it to brown-Mmm much more sexy ( if you can have sexy sprites that is ). Level 3 has the lovely gliders and then we have the challenging level 4 with the mini basket balloons ( Please can we change the colours of the mini basket balloons Richard (Yes, but we can talk about it in the new year)? Yellow and Dark Blue don't seem to work for me sorry ). Then its the BIG AND BEEFY Basket Balloon, Richard has expanded this in the x and y registers to create a monster balloon, its created with 3 sprites, two for the balloon bit and one for the actual basket bit. This is a bit strange for me because I actually didn't want it quite so big, this again is my fault, I created the Graphics in Firebird Graphic Editor and just assumed when I sent them to Richard that he would just duplicate what he saw in the editor in the game, hmm, sorry Richard, oh well it is my fault and these are tiny niggles in what is shaping up to be a nice shoot em up.Thank you Richard and Andrew, you guys rock! I also got the Wigmore Artist this week ( Thank you again andrew ), its the utility art package I use to draw bitmaps, during my C64 career I have drawn over a 100 Bitmaps! Why not checkout the MR MEN SLIDE SHOW, THE SOUTH PARK SLIDE SHOW or the STAR WARS SLIDE SHOW, all collaborations with my old friend ( well he's not that old really giggle )? There are many out there advanced art studio, koala pad, blah blah, I just personally prefer Wigmore Artist, despite searching at home I had had no luck in finding it, I suspect its out in the garage after the upheaval earlier on in the year, but thank to Andrew I now have it again so when I get some artwork I can draw the title screen etc.
17th December 2009 - SEUCK it to me (Wayne)
Hello there, well after waiting for quite a while for both artists I decided to have a bash at doing the graphics for the title screen myself, I have drawn the plane, some clouds and a balloon, not much but in the space of two days its quite good for me. Trivia: Did you know how this game came about? I played the game KIKSTART on the Commodore 16 in the mid 80s, the game contains balloons and I thought it would be great to have a game that required you to collect balloons as an integral part of the game. Last year I was sat in my bedroom bored and started tinkering with the Firebird Graphic Editor with the intention of creating a game with RICHARD although I had not even asked him at this point! After seeing SUB HUNTER I thought it would be nice to do something with clouds and parallax scrolling that scrolled the traditional way for a scroller on the C64. Two/Three months later I had created what would be the template graphics for UP IN THE AIR. Andrew Fisher very kindly converted these to Sideways SEUCK and I knocked up a VERY early draft of UP IN THE AIR, not long after this Richard came onboard and then ever since we have had the online diary! Fun huh! Bye for now dudes...
25th December 2009 - ?Load, Error, Ready. (Wayne)
Surprise dudes! I wasn't expecting to get chance but here I am at the keys again. Last week I managed to begin drawing the Loading Screen ( although this may only be for the disk version as a disk filler, it depends how much memory Richard has left in the game when he has finished ). I had to tweak ( no change there then ! ) and mess with one or two things but its looking rather good now, may have a look tonight or tomorrow and do some more work on it. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.
Today I played out with the dog and also played inside on my GAME CUBE - STAR FOX ADVENTURES is truly amazing!!! Hopefully in the new year I will send the UITA artwork on to Richard and I give him my permission to display my BITMAP picture on this website! Bye for now! Best Wishes for an Awesome 2010!
7th January 2010 - Hey Ma, I'm drawing a loading picture. (Wayne)
Well After what seems like an eternity I finally finished my BITMAP screen for UITA! If I can push myself I will get this sent over to Andrew this week. Now I am sat twiddling my thumbs, or am I? Erm the answer is NO, because UITA is going to be on Disk as well as Tape I thought it would be nice to have a disk filler or two so I have begun drawing some graphics for a small space shoot em up, My girlfriend likes shoot em ups so I decided to do this as a bit of a giggle for her-well that is if Richard likes my graphics and also if he doesn't mind doing a shoot em up ( cue sounds of Richard picking up a hatchet and lobbing my head off giggle ) to go on the UITA disk. Regarding UITA, Towards the back end of last year Richard did mention to me that he may not be able to fit all of the game in to one load, my thoughts on that are this - either try and cram everything in(!) to one load and make sacrifices or do 10 levels per load, that way the tape version could have levels 1 to 10 on Side A and 11 to 20 on Side B, perhaps the second batch of levels could have a password system to allow access to them. Oh by the way, on a totally unrelated matter I have been working on the Sprite graphics for CAMELS IN SPACE 2 on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week LOVE MY COMMODORE 64!!!!!!
17th January 2010 - Hang over (Richard)
Oh dear, I have been up the pub last night with my mum, my dad and my sister's husband's dad. We had quite a bit of a drinking session last night. I only lasted up to 4 pints of Fosters and they lasted up to 6. Man my head still hurts a bit today. BUT THAT WILL NOT PUT ME OFF WITH THIS GAME PROJECT. I don't feel too bad now, unlike I was very early in the morning.
Since my Christmas break, writing Bah, Humbug! and also programming a couple of C64 utilities (I was going to write another Sideways scrolling SEUCK game, but didn't at the end) and also working 6 days in a row in one week twice over the Christmas period. So today I am back to pick up the pieces from where I was last left off. It didn't take me that long to remember. I only had to do a little thing, which was change the colour of the boss balloon. I used a pink balloon and yellow basket. Wayne wanted me to change the colour to the balloon that was showed in the SEUCK example I was given by Andrew a few weeks or months back. Got it sorted :o) I took a look at Wayne's new status bar for the game. It looks good, but for now I shall leave that until last. I have the main game to work on before graphics enhancements. Anyway after I saw the message added above the status bar. It sort of made me laugh :o). Oh yes, it sure did make me laugh. Here's exactly what the message read out:
OH MY GOD! WAYNE IS A C64 GENIUS! LOL
IT'S THE NEW UP TO DATE STATUS PANEL
LOOK AT THE LOVELY HELICOPTER IN THE
STATUS PANEL!
I'VE EVEN UPDATED THE BALLOONS BIT TOO!
IT'S 1:23AM ON THE 21ST OF NOV 2009
NOTE TO RICHARD. PROBABLY BEST IF YOU
DON'T SCROLL THIS BIT -CHORTLE- THESE
ARE THE DUMBEST LEVEL GRAPHICS IN A GAME
EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :-)
Well, why would I want to use the text as the scrolling background graphics? Actually I just could not resist the temptation into to doing exactly that, but you gamers would not want to see that in the game would you? Nope, I thought not. :o)
Anyway, I went back to the SEUCK level examples to see what level 5 looks like and how the enemies should move. Oh no. I've got a bit of a challenge for this one. The enemies for this stage are thunder clouds. Which means that those objects will have to shoot. That means that I will have to program some more routines to allow the thunder clouds to shoot. I'll work on this next week, because of my slight hangover :o).
23rd January 2010 - Level 5 in the works (Richard)
Well, it was meant to have been yesterday, but I just did not have the motivation to do more, so I decided to work on parts of level 5 today. First of all, I had to set up the colour table settings for this level, also set up the enemy types for this level. Wayne emailed me to let me know that the thunder clouds should shoot the lightning bolts and should not allow the player to shoot at the clouds as this would be very unrealistic. Bah, that spoils the fun, but it must be done. Before I could do any of this, I set up the colour scheme for level 5 (Wayne, are you sure you want a cyan sky with medium grey thunder clouds? I think a black sky would probably be just right for this level. I have not changed the colour scheme for this level.
After setting up the parameters and level settings for the game, I got exomizer to decrunch level 5's background, but the result looked really ugly. It appeared to be the case where the graphics was drawn with an older character set and later graphics used the empty or used characters which were supposed to form a nice background. Unfortunately, little does Wayne realize is that level 5's cloud background will need a good tidy up. I can tidy everything up on screen as soon as main the game engine is finally finished. So for now, I used level 1's background for this level for the time being. Just look at level 5's screen. Eurgh!
Now that the worst bits are over. It is time for me to get those clouds moving and strike thunder. The best way for this level will be to make the lightning go downwards but move across the screen as well. Well, I have done this, but it still does not seem to be right at the moment. I can't be asked to do any more tweaking of this game today, maybe some other time when I get the time and motivation for it.
A couple of outstanding entries from Wayne here today. Sadly I did not get round to adding those 2 diary entries until today. I got a bit carried away writing a brand new game for Digital Talk and the Retro Vision 2010 convention (Sadly I will not be there) so there's not much of an update this week. I should hopefully be back on to this game some time this weekend or maybe next week. :o)
28th January 2010 - UITA Artwork received (Wayne)
Hello peeps, well yesterday I got the
artwork for UITA so know I can today start doing the conversion from
paper to screen of the picture. Special Guest chair today for my
girlfriend who is sat next to me in
the library !!!!!!! :->
2nd February 2010
- More pictures (Wayne)
Well good to my word I went home and
spent about 3 and a half to 4 hours converting Rachels picture over
to the good old C64 I used “The Wigmore Artist”, it felt good
going back to it, like revisiting an old friend if you like. I fired
up the good old C64 on Monday night and added one or two little bits
of work ( the Psytronik logo, cos that's where I want to publish the
game with and a credit to Rachel for the picture. (No problem Wayne,
when I get round to doing the tape mastering, I'll add Rachel's
credit on the loading scroll text - Richard) . I sent it off to
Andrew and he says he will look at both my Bitmaps by the weekend.
(Don't forget to show me as well :o)).
3rd February 2010
- Disk Menu - WHAT? ALREADY? (Wayne)
Been to CEX in LEEDS today got BABYLON 5 SERIES 4 for 8 quid and LUIGIS MANSION (GAMECUBE) for 8 quid, normally I work Friday but I was owed some time off work-YIPPEE! Am heading home after this to do some work on the space shoot em up game for the disk version, you lucky lucky people!!! A big thankyou to Richard for adding these diary entries-much appreciated mate! Also I may start doing the disk menu for the disk version I suppose its better than doing the disk menu for the tape version-DOH! HEE HEE see what I did there! Bye for now!
5th February 2010 - Lightning strikes
(Richard Bayliss)
Have you missed me for a while? I
thought so :o). Don't worry, I wasn't in hibernation. I got a bit
carried away doing a few other things. Actually I made 2 new C64 games
over the week or so, and also a little demo for someone else. You'll
find out later on this month or maybe next month what 2 games I have
done, when they get uploaded on to the TND web site. Oh okay. They are Mutilator, a horizontal scrolling
shmup and Moo-tilation a
loader game. Anyway, now that those 2 games are finito, completo, etc.
I have returned today by Wayne's request to try and get level 5 done
and ready. Oh and last night I would have done a bit more on this but I
got carried away playing 3D Pinball
Power by Mastertronic Plus
on my Commodore 64. I just could not believe how fast that game loaded
from the tape (From 000 - 036 on the tape counter).
Well, last time I had problems with the
behaviour of the clouds and lightning. The way the lightning moved
cause a few issues for this stage. Everything was just erm ... well ...
a major ... no, sorry, scattered sprites. Lightning was moving the
correct way, but one problem was controlling it. I also remember
suggesting to change the colour scheme for level 5, so now level 5's
background is black - as it suited the stage. I also noticed that the
balloons were a wrong colour as well. The balloon was meant to have
been red, but for some reason the balloon ended up the same colour as
the storm clouds. How daft is that. Oh well.
Anyway back to the storm cloud behaviour
techniques. To get the lightning working the correct way. I have to
change the Y-direction for enemy 2 slightly, where I check for the X
position of where the lightning is, and also check for the Y position
to see if the lightning has reached its limit (the bottom of the
screen). I added a routine which is something like ..... Ah, a nice cup
of tea .... Oops, sorry, time for the example routine. This was just a
rough idea.
lda .LEVEL
cmp #$05 ;If level 5
bne .NotLevel5
lda LightningobjectX
cmp InsideGameScreen
bcs NotInsideGameScreen
lda LightningobjectY
cmp YpositionLimit
bcc .NotReachedLimit
jsr .ResetLightning
rts
;Continue main movement routine
.....
.Resetlightning
lda CloudObjectX
sta LightningObjectX
lda CloudObjectY
sta LightningObjectY
rts
My theory sort of worked, but I still came across another problem with the cloud behaviour. For some reason, the lightning seems to pause a little before going down more and then after reaching the Y position of #$CA it just stays there until off screen. This was something I did not want to see so now, time to keep tweaking the movement routine until I get it correct. Bah! Well, I deleted a few unecessary routines and added one or two to check the range of where the sprites are, but at the moment it is looking a little much better, but there is still some tweaking required for the lightning. At last. It's done.
Now my next task is to disable the player from shooting exclusively for this stage. Then fingers crossed, level 5 is finished. I have to be informed whether it is finished or not before I move on to level 6. LOL! Actually, by the time you are reading this thingy, the task has been done.
10th February 2010 (15th February 2010) - SEUCK High Jinks
Again I have been playing Luigis Mansion, what a brilliant game, it gave me an idea for a C64 game but I shall put that on the back burner for a while... O.K. so what have I done this week, well... I had done some graphics for a silly little shoot em up, I sent them on to Richard via Andrew in the hope that Richard might do something with them, he emailed me back last week saying he is busy with UITA, ok, this is not a problem. I loaded up my version of the sprites converted them over to SEUCK, loaded Seuck and after two sittings over two days- "ZIP ZAP ZOP" is born! Also I was playing the Activision Anthology for the Playstation 2 ( fantastic retro gaming- its an Atari 2600 compilation ! ) last week at my good friend Pauls. One game in particular caught my eye -"HIJINKS". So I have begun work on a SEUCK style "HIJINKS" game with differences of course, I dont fancy ATARI suing me... Its only going to be simple game, but a nice little addition to the disk version... And yes I still need to do that blinking Disk menu and write the instruction manual out... On a plus note I have contacted Richard and he gives permission to release his latest version of BOMBCHASE on to CARTRIDGE and I have also asked about releasing UP IN THE AIR on Cartridge and he said yes to that too. YIPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! ( Wayne is excited C64 fans !!!!!!!! ) So we can now officially announce UITA is going to come on TAPE/DISK and ( RGCD People willing ) CARTRIDGE too-Mmmm nice! See you soon!
Note: This entry has been published on to the TND web site, a few days later as I have been ill between 8th February 2010 - 11th February 2010. I finally recovered from a nasty cold last night. So fingers crossed, another update later on this week - Richard.
21st February 2010 - Send in the choppers (Richard)
Although I have started working on Bionik Granny Returns on Friday, I have decided to do some more UITA programming today. Well, the start of level 6 of course. It seems that the SEUCK example, which Wayne provided me, only had a boss plane for level 6 and the Sideways SEUCK game preview which I saw had helicopters. So I am assuming that for this stage, the enemies are to be helicopters. Hang on. Helicopters are probably not enough for this stage, so I decided to add some spinning enemy stunt planes as well. Both enemies need a certain number of hits before they are destroyed. So I set the hit counter to 5 before they all blow to smithereens. Wahey! I think level 6 is starting to come out quite nicely. I will still need to do a boss stage for this level, but that can wait until later on this week (or next). I am pleased with the progress with it so far. Pictured below is level 6. I will not be showing many pictures for this game project.
21st February 2010 - SEUCK it to me (Wayne)
Have been doing some work on my Seuck game its going to be called Flight Of Freedom. Basically drawing new enemies and setting up levels, have begun work on Level 6 this week, "FLIGHT" is beginning to look like a vertical version of UP IN THE AIR which is no bad thing but I plan to have new and different enemies to UITA so you guys and girls arent going to be disappointed when you play it. I am expecting my latest version of UITA from Richard through the post Monday or Tuesday so I hope to give you all feedback on that next time I am on here. Bye for now
Best Wishes and get well soon Richard. (I'm much better now Wayne, and I will look
forward to your SEUCK game as well dude!)
28th February 2010 - Level 5 test (Wayne)
I also forgot to mention last Saturday me and Carol went to Wakefield for the day I ended up getting 80 quid's worth of games in total I got stuff for the Game cube and I got the double pack of Driver 1 and 2 for 2 quid - bargain! Also got one of those GCON 5 guns for the Playstation 1 - lovely! Anyway enough self indulgent waffle what have I been up to... (What is that to do with Up in the Air? Eh?. Heheheheheheh!)
Well, I have done a little bit more work on the SEUCK game FLIGHT OF FREEDOM, realistically I am planning on completing it for when I go down to see Andrew Fisher on 15th March, am dreading travelling, its 3 trains and travelling always knackers me out but hey ho its worth it to see my good and dear friend Andrew! FLIGHT OF FREEDOM will be for the disk version of UP IN THE AIR only (Oh come on Wayne, what about a version for me to put on tape? I have the urge to add my loader game, Moo-Tilation on to the game. Oh, it doesn't matter. I stuck it on Mutilator anyway.). Its my way of saying THANK YOU for bothering to buy the disk version of this game!
I got chance to play the latest level (5) of UITA last Monday. Of course by now Richard has gone on to Level 6 (YIPEE!) I have noticed one or two problems with level 5. First of all the enemy clouds will need to be set to high resolution and not multicolour, hence that is the reason they look wierd. This was my fault because I did not mention this to Richard (erm I think they may also need expanding in the x direction but I will let Richard know next time I am on the Internet). Also the speed of the lightning from the clouds appears to be a little slow and is VERY easy to dodge.
Finally, sometimes lightning seems to appear from nowhere. Lightning is supposed to be coming from the clouds and you have to dodge it.(Oops, I better take a look at this Tuesday or Wednesday while football is on - coz I hate footy.)
The colour for the level is perfect and I like the fact that you can't shoot at the clouds or thunder. Am I just getting slightly irritated at the slight tweaks the game needs. I know Richard will fix them but the short tempered frustrated side of me wants everything to be fixed and working now. (Good things come to those who wait. (grin)). As my friend, Richard Gott says at work "Wayne you are as subtle as a brick"! Hee Hee! So today I am going to go home and do some more work on "FLIGHT". I hear Richard is working on a remixed version of Bionic Granny this is great news however erm I never actually played the original!!! (You might find the original Mastertronic title on EBay but let me warn you how bad that one really is).
I have some news myself. Some programming dude is working on a car racing game and Andrew Fisher has approached me and asked me if I would like to do the graphics for it, of course I said yes I do actually have graphics for 3 overhead racing games that never got finished/released. A shame because I didn't think that my graphics were bad but maybe I am biased... :-) By the way what happened to that Enforcer 2 game that demo crew started working on, the project appears to have gone dead. It is a shame because I did graphics for this game too... What is it with me doing graphics for games that die in the water? Maybe I should give myself the handle-Jinx HO HO!
4th March 2010 - Flying through a Thursday afternoon
It is unusual that I program more on game projects on a working Thursday, but today and next week, I will have plenty of time in the afternoon to do what I like. I did say that I'll be doing some more work on UITA, which was to fix the sprite settings for level 5 on Tuesday or yesterday, but because I worked overtime for another 2 hours, I felt shattered. Also yesterday, although I finished work at my normal time (8am - 4pm shift), I been making a new version of the Dance-A-Load loader (Which features BeyondReproach's new version of the Dance-A-Load loader tune). I also got an email back from Wayne, that he'd like level 6 to have Gyrocopters instead of what I originally added. Well, first thing's first I got back into the cross assembler and did some tweaking to level 5's clouds. It appeared that those clouds need multicolour switched off and that the multicolour for other sprites must be switched on. How am I to do that? I tried tweaking the $D01C pointers to get the right modes for each sprite, but there are too many values to cycle through. So I came up with another idea (which sounds daft, but it works). Go back to the graphics editor and paint round the clouds with the actual sprite colour.
After updating the cloud, by using the multicolour mode. I imported the new sprite data into the game project's source folder and updated the files for ACME to link together as one single file. Then I compressed it all with Exomizer, ready to check out the result in Vice. I want to see how the cloud will look in the game before I can move on. Seems to look all right now. However, I will need to update the colour settings for each cloud. Thunder clouds are dark grey/black. So I altered the colour data table so that all of the thunder clouds are dark grey. Looks much better now.
Wayne has pointed out (in his last email) to me that the thunder is moving too slow and would like me to speed the Y position of the lightning. So I updated the Y speed table to 2, so that the lightning will move down fast. Much better. I sort of got the level to work slightly better than before, but to be honest. There isn't much I really can do for this level. The lightning shooting will need to be timed, but that can wait until some other time, maybe this weekend. The same with adding the Gyrocopters for level 6 and also a boss plane to battle for that stage. Still things are starting to look on the positive side. :o).
4th March 2010 - Wayne's apologies
After my rant last time I really do feel like I should be eating humble pie. Humble apologies to Richard. Fight Of Freedom is almost complete I did a LOAD of work on it this morning. I may have it finished on TUESDAY at this rate...
12th March 2010 - SEUCK on this (Wayne)
Ok so apart from being full of cold - sneezing, coughing and having that pinching sensation in my nose what else is going on with me? Well I have tweaked and improved FLIGHT OF FREEDOM, I spent time sorting out shadows for the sprite graphics and backgrounds. This is the most work I have ever done with such things in a SEUCK game before but ultimately I think it is worth it... Richard suggested I release this game (flight of freedom on the tape version too yeah ok then Richard :-> ( Am so enjoying my library time here now that nasty little chav at the side of me has gone!!! LOL ! ). I have also started work on a new SEUCK game, whether it goes on the UITA disk version or not is another matter, we shall have to see... I have also begun working on some ideas for the disk menu, I did some coding for something else years ago and may be able to reuse this code for the UITA disk menu, am taking this to Andrews when I go over next week. Hopefully between us we should be able to knock up something nice :-> Am planning on resting, playing games and generally having a doss, well it is my week off after all...
12th March 2010 - What's been happening (Richard)
Well, finally the weekend is here. It seems that Wayne has been busy with his SEUCK stuff, while I haven't done anything with the project this week, as I have been busy at work and have not really been feeling enthusiastic to continue over the week ahead. Anyway I had an email from Wayne yesterday about Level 5. It seems that he does not want level 5's cloud sprites to use multicolour mode and wants them in hires. Sadly because of too many hires/multicolour combinations for the sprites. I find this to be an impossible task to accomplish. Sorry Wayne, but we'll have to leave those clouds as they are. However, he also mentioned that he would like the clouds and lightning's x-axis to be expanded. That sounds like a great idea, as it will give less room for the player to move around let's see what I can do over the weekend.
13th March 2010 - Head above the clouds. (Richard)
Before I decided to give up on the mixed hires/multicolour parts in the game (as I thought it might be impossible), I was speaking to Andrew on Fisher MSN messenger and found out that this mixed combination can be possible. After what I read Andrew's comments on MSN messenger, I decided to try and get something done about this problem. So drew a test sprite, saved it on to a .D64 image then I booted up the Turbo Assembler (On SounDEMON's cartridge ROM thingy) and written a simple little test program to try and work out the correct combination for certain values for expanding sprites and making sprite multicolour for this game. After running it and testing the program. I looked at the value for turning sprite multicolour off/on (Sprites 0,1,3,5 and,7 all should be multicolour, and 2,4 and 6 should all be hires sprites). I got the value on screen. Implemented the poke value #171 to $D01C (in level 5's code) and also added poke value #124 to $D01D. Assembled the game and run the program. Guess what? It worked :) my problem has been solved at last. Despite the explosion part still being in hires for the clouds, but that is just about right for the cloud sprites.
This little program is available from THE DOWNLOAD TOOLS PAGE. If you want to try it out for yourself . :o)
Now that I got this to work, I updated the Get Ready and Game Over routines, so that all sprites are multicolour. I'm quite please with the work done for this level so far. Works quite nicely. Now all I will need to do for this level is to create some timing for the lightning to appear from the clouds. Then hopefully we should have a final result for this level. Then afterwards, add the Gyrocopters into Level 6 followed by end of level 6 boss.
16th March 2010 - The List (Wayne)
28th February 2010 - Level 5 test (Wayne)
I also forgot to mention last Saturday me and Carol went to Wakefield for the day I ended up getting 80 quid's worth of games in total I got stuff for the Game cube and I got the double pack of Driver 1 and 2 for 2 quid - bargain! Also got one of those GCON 5 guns for the Playstation 1 - lovely! Anyway enough self indulgent waffle what have I been up to... (What is that to do with Up in the Air? Eh?. Heheheheheheh!)
Well, I have done a little bit more work on the SEUCK game FLIGHT OF FREEDOM, realistically I am planning on completing it for when I go down to see Andrew Fisher on 15th March, am dreading travelling, its 3 trains and travelling always knackers me out but hey ho its worth it to see my good and dear friend Andrew! FLIGHT OF FREEDOM will be for the disk version of UP IN THE AIR only (Oh come on Wayne, what about a version for me to put on tape? I have the urge to add my loader game, Moo-Tilation on to the game. Oh, it doesn't matter. I stuck it on Mutilator anyway.). Its my way of saying THANK YOU for bothering to buy the disk version of this game!
I got chance to play the latest level (5) of UITA last Monday. Of course by now Richard has gone on to Level 6 (YIPEE!) I have noticed one or two problems with level 5. First of all the enemy clouds will need to be set to high resolution and not multicolour, hence that is the reason they look wierd. This was my fault because I did not mention this to Richard (erm I think they may also need expanding in the x direction but I will let Richard know next time I am on the Internet). Also the speed of the lightning from the clouds appears to be a little slow and is VERY easy to dodge.
Finally, sometimes lightning seems to appear from nowhere. Lightning is supposed to be coming from the clouds and you have to dodge it.(Oops, I better take a look at this Tuesday or Wednesday while football is on - coz I hate footy.)
The colour for the level is perfect and I like the fact that you can't shoot at the clouds or thunder. Am I just getting slightly irritated at the slight tweaks the game needs. I know Richard will fix them but the short tempered frustrated side of me wants everything to be fixed and working now. (Good things come to those who wait. (grin)). As my friend, Richard Gott says at work "Wayne you are as subtle as a brick"! Hee Hee! So today I am going to go home and do some more work on "FLIGHT". I hear Richard is working on a remixed version of Bionic Granny this is great news however erm I never actually played the original!!! (You might find the original Mastertronic title on EBay but let me warn you how bad that one really is).
I have some news myself. Some programming dude is working on a car racing game and Andrew Fisher has approached me and asked me if I would like to do the graphics for it, of course I said yes I do actually have graphics for 3 overhead racing games that never got finished/released. A shame because I didn't think that my graphics were bad but maybe I am biased... :-) By the way what happened to that Enforcer 2 game that demo crew started working on, the project appears to have gone dead. It is a shame because I did graphics for this game too... What is it with me doing graphics for games that die in the water? Maybe I should give myself the handle-Jinx HO HO!
4th March 2010 - Flying through a Thursday afternoon
It is unusual that I program more on game projects on a working Thursday, but today and next week, I will have plenty of time in the afternoon to do what I like. I did say that I'll be doing some more work on UITA, which was to fix the sprite settings for level 5 on Tuesday or yesterday, but because I worked overtime for another 2 hours, I felt shattered. Also yesterday, although I finished work at my normal time (8am - 4pm shift), I been making a new version of the Dance-A-Load loader (Which features BeyondReproach's new version of the Dance-A-Load loader tune). I also got an email back from Wayne, that he'd like level 6 to have Gyrocopters instead of what I originally added. Well, first thing's first I got back into the cross assembler and did some tweaking to level 5's clouds. It appeared that those clouds need multicolour switched off and that the multicolour for other sprites must be switched on. How am I to do that? I tried tweaking the $D01C pointers to get the right modes for each sprite, but there are too many values to cycle through. So I came up with another idea (which sounds daft, but it works). Go back to the graphics editor and paint round the clouds with the actual sprite colour.
After updating the cloud, by using the multicolour mode. I imported the new sprite data into the game project's source folder and updated the files for ACME to link together as one single file. Then I compressed it all with Exomizer, ready to check out the result in Vice. I want to see how the cloud will look in the game before I can move on. Seems to look all right now. However, I will need to update the colour settings for each cloud. Thunder clouds are dark grey/black. So I altered the colour data table so that all of the thunder clouds are dark grey. Looks much better now.
Wayne has pointed out (in his last email) to me that the thunder is moving too slow and would like me to speed the Y position of the lightning. So I updated the Y speed table to 2, so that the lightning will move down fast. Much better. I sort of got the level to work slightly better than before, but to be honest. There isn't much I really can do for this level. The lightning shooting will need to be timed, but that can wait until some other time, maybe this weekend. The same with adding the Gyrocopters for level 6 and also a boss plane to battle for that stage. Still things are starting to look on the positive side. :o).
4th March 2010 - Wayne's apologies
After my rant last time I really do feel like I should be eating humble pie. Humble apologies to Richard. Fight Of Freedom is almost complete I did a LOAD of work on it this morning. I may have it finished on TUESDAY at this rate...
12th March 2010 - SEUCK on this (Wayne)
Ok so apart from being full of cold - sneezing, coughing and having that pinching sensation in my nose what else is going on with me? Well I have tweaked and improved FLIGHT OF FREEDOM, I spent time sorting out shadows for the sprite graphics and backgrounds. This is the most work I have ever done with such things in a SEUCK game before but ultimately I think it is worth it... Richard suggested I release this game (flight of freedom on the tape version too yeah ok then Richard :-> ( Am so enjoying my library time here now that nasty little chav at the side of me has gone!!! LOL ! ). I have also started work on a new SEUCK game, whether it goes on the UITA disk version or not is another matter, we shall have to see... I have also begun working on some ideas for the disk menu, I did some coding for something else years ago and may be able to reuse this code for the UITA disk menu, am taking this to Andrews when I go over next week. Hopefully between us we should be able to knock up something nice :-> Am planning on resting, playing games and generally having a doss, well it is my week off after all...
12th March 2010 - What's been happening (Richard)
Well, finally the weekend is here. It seems that Wayne has been busy with his SEUCK stuff, while I haven't done anything with the project this week, as I have been busy at work and have not really been feeling enthusiastic to continue over the week ahead. Anyway I had an email from Wayne yesterday about Level 5. It seems that he does not want level 5's cloud sprites to use multicolour mode and wants them in hires. Sadly because of too many hires/multicolour combinations for the sprites. I find this to be an impossible task to accomplish. Sorry Wayne, but we'll have to leave those clouds as they are. However, he also mentioned that he would like the clouds and lightning's x-axis to be expanded. That sounds like a great idea, as it will give less room for the player to move around let's see what I can do over the weekend.
13th March 2010 - Head above the clouds. (Richard)
Before I decided to give up on the mixed hires/multicolour parts in the game (as I thought it might be impossible), I was speaking to Andrew on Fisher MSN messenger and found out that this mixed combination can be possible. After what I read Andrew's comments on MSN messenger, I decided to try and get something done about this problem. So drew a test sprite, saved it on to a .D64 image then I booted up the Turbo Assembler (On SounDEMON's cartridge ROM thingy) and written a simple little test program to try and work out the correct combination for certain values for expanding sprites and making sprite multicolour for this game. After running it and testing the program. I looked at the value for turning sprite multicolour off/on (Sprites 0,1,3,5 and,7 all should be multicolour, and 2,4 and 6 should all be hires sprites). I got the value on screen. Implemented the poke value #171 to $D01C (in level 5's code) and also added poke value #124 to $D01D. Assembled the game and run the program. Guess what? It worked :) my problem has been solved at last. Despite the explosion part still being in hires for the clouds, but that is just about right for the cloud sprites.
This little program is available from THE DOWNLOAD TOOLS PAGE. If you want to try it out for yourself . :o)
Now that I got this to work, I updated the Get Ready and Game Over routines, so that all sprites are multicolour. I'm quite please with the work done for this level so far. Works quite nicely. Now all I will need to do for this level is to create some timing for the lightning to appear from the clouds. Then hopefully we should have a final result for this level. Then afterwards, add the Gyrocopters into Level 6 followed by end of level 6 boss.
16th March 2010 - The List (Wayne)
Okay! So today, Wednesday and Thursday morning I am over here at Andrews, its lovely being on holiday it gives me chance to rest and recharge my batteries ( and talk C64 Stuff with Andrew of course !!! ). I showed Andrew Flight Of Freedom last night and he seemed pleased with it, this is fantastic news When you sit creating these games in your bedroom you do kinda wonder "Is this okay" and "Is anyone else going to like it?". Its nice to see Richard working on BIONIK GRANNY RETURNS too I think it is going to be a lot of fun, like I said to him last time, it looks like one of those early 80s TASKSET games :->
This morning we sent over the list of
enemies for UP IN THE AIR to Richard, me and Andrew did briefly
discuss if we should try and do something to vary the game but
unfortunately we are so far into the project now it would be hard to
make the changes without a load of hassle.
20th
March 2010 - A visit to Andrew's place (Wayne)
Well today I was going to go back to
Wakefield and buy a Spectrum
Plus 2 but to be honest I couldn't be bothered, I went to LEEDS
yesterday and did a little shopping ( yes I bought more computer games
Gamecube and Snes! ) and I am off to a christening bright and early
tomorrow ( Groan - I hate early mornings!!! ). Well this week has
gone
nicely, firstly I would like to say thank you to Andrew and his family
for letting me stay this week. We got to discuss some things about UITA
like the music and sound effects and I showed Andrew Flight Of Freedom.
He seemed pleased with it, this is great cos I had my doubts about the
game, its always nice to get feedback from someone else.
Also Andrew
sent the list of attack waves on to Richard and he ( Richard
) has said
he will try and do a level a week this too is VERY good news. Andrew
very kindly copied over the CARTOGRAPH ( is that right ? ) program from
C64.com - this is a program that lets you create scrolling
maps for
games, wish I had had this at the beginning, I would probably have used
this to create a massive scrolling set of screens to use in
UITA.
Anyway I hope to get to grips with this and use it for future projects,
it should take a LOT of work of the programmer of any future "WAYNE"
games. Add to this I am working on a new SEUCK game ( UP SCREEN
not sideways ! ), And I hope to do a remix of FLIGHT OF
FREEDOM for
Andrew Fishers SEUCK VAULT too, oh and I need to re-touch the picture I
sent Andrew of UITA, the one that Rachel drew for me! Ouch, not much to
do then! LOL! Also while Iam here I must mention "ON THE FARM"
this is
a new game on Richard's web site free to download, it reminds me of the
old 1980s games, like POTTY PIGEON ( love that game ! ). You play a
sheep who has to go round scoffing all the grass to complete the level,
there are enemies to avoid and the graphics are lovely. This really
does deserve a release on tape or disk perhaps PSYTRONIK SOFTWARE might
publish it? The other game of note this week is BARNEY, to be honest I
thought it would be about a bear but its a beautifully drawn sideways
SEUCK game check it out, its wonderful, some terrific graphics, tough
game play but very enjoyable!!!
Also BIG THANK YOU to Andrews mum for
that fantastic packed lunch she
did me for coming home on the trains. YUM YUM BUBBLEGUM! LOL!
By the way the person who dissed me on
the Commodore Scene Database
needs to get a life! How can you not know who my STAR WARS picture is
of
- ( O.M.G! LOL! ) its the MODAL NODES, or as they are better
known THE
CANTINA BAND! SCI FI totally rules - nuff said!!! :->
21st
March 2010 - A bit of gaming. (Richard)
Yesterday I had an email from Andrew
along with a couple of attachments added. They were 2 .d64's with two
SEUCK games by Wayne. One was called FLIGHT OF FREEDOM and the other
was called ZIP ZAP ZOP. So WHAT THE HELL HAS THIS GOT TO DO WITH UP IN
THE AIR? Well, these games are disk fillers for the Up in the Air game
(If I ever get it finished that is). I played the game, Flight of
Freedom and it was based on (you guessed it) Up in the Air. Hahahahaha.
Playing this game sort of reminds me of the classic 1942 and 1943
games, except for that the attack waves are similar to Up in the Air.
The game is quite fun. The game is damn right tricky to play though. I
have never been a good gamer. I'm not even good at BLUE MAX by U.S.
GOLD SOFTWARE. I just get as far as 3rd ranking. :o)
After having a bash (or two) at Flight
of Freedom. I loaded up ZIP ZAP ZOP and had a little play at this game.
Looks quite interesting, but that SEUCK game was just TOO easy to
complete. Perhaps Wayne should have made the game longer, as to me it
feels rather unfinished. Wait a minute, weren't most of my old SEUCK
games unfinished? They seemed to have been, as I hardly made some good
endings with those in the past. My most unfinished game was
International Skoda Racin' 'n Bashin' which I released to Binary Zone
PD back in 1995, just for a bit of fun.
I noticed that most of the time, when
Wayne makes a SEUCK game, he seems to use the SEUCK red colour cycling
routine on the front end quite a lot. Nothing wrong with that :o). I
always used my own blue/red mix colour bar sequence for MOST of my
Nyaaaah! games :o). Flight of Freedom was good fun, but Zip Zap Zop is
just too short. More of a game preview than a full game. :o) Hope Wayne
adds some more nice ideas into ZIP ZAP ZOP. Would be interesting to see
the final outcome of this game. :o)
2nd
April 2010 - Expand those sprites and paint level 2's big bird a
different colour (Richard)
Well, here I am back on the game project
again, although I was sort of eager to work on more of Bionik Granny
Returns this weekend. Ah well. It does not really do much harm working
on both projects. :) Now
then, it appears that Wayne wants me to have just the clouds expanded
and as well as hires colour. So I loaded up my little calculation
program to work out the decimal value for expansions of sprites 2, 4
and 6 while sprites 0,1,3,5,7 are not expanded. The result ended up
with #84. So I added into the ACME cross assembler source code: LDA #84
: STA $D01D then assembled and compact the entire code with Exomizer
V2. I tested it and the X-size of the thunder clouds expanded nicely.
Pretty good result. There is still something that needs to be dealth
with for this stage, and that is the lightning. For some reason the
lightning keeps appearing in strange places. So this will be another
job for me to look at some time later on in the week. As I am off to
the pub soon. But before I go, I shall update the level 2 by changing
the colours of the boss bird from black to brown. Now off to the pub I
go, more work on this game tomorrow :o)
Now for some of Wayne's diary entries.
28th March 2010 - Flying for freedom (Wayne)
I have now completed and passed on FLIGHT OF FREEDOM to Andrew ( And Richard ) also check out SEUCK VAULT for a free download special remix of FLIGHT OF FREEDOM- my gift to all you lovely people waiting for UITA :-> Have now started the menu for the disk version of UITA, its looking nice... :->
29th March 2010 - My head hurts - episode 2 (Wayne)
Tiredness, irritability, headaches? Then you are clearly working
on a C64 Game like me then :-> Basically I have finally got round to
doing the menu system for UITA. I creted a brand new character set from
scratch ( I suppose I could have reused the character set from UITA but
I decided to do a new one from fresh ) The menu will involve a
raster
split, a piece of cake for Richard, to allow two different sets of
colours. Dont worry Richard, you will understand when you see it! I did
send version 1 of this to Andrew last week but I am now on Version 3,
the graphics are improved and it is just about completed!
Hopefully by this point Richard will have the Bitmap picture for the Loading ( or title ! ) Screen for UITA, I am giving him my permission to use it on the website. Also I am working on a new SEUCK game, I sent Andrew a remix of FLIGHT OF FREEDOM last week for the SEUCK VAULT website which you can download for free when he gets round to uploading it, I know he is busy!!!
Hopefully by this point Richard will have the Bitmap picture for the Loading ( or title ! ) Screen for UITA, I am giving him my permission to use it on the website. Also I am working on a new SEUCK game, I sent Andrew a remix of FLIGHT OF FREEDOM last week for the SEUCK VAULT website which you can download for free when he gets round to uploading it, I know he is busy!!!
4th April - Enter the Gyrocopters (Richard)
Well, not much today. I have added the Gyrocopters into level 6. Level 5 still needs a lot of tweaking, but to be honest. I haven't been very well this weekend, yet another nasty cold has hit me.
10th April 2010 - Struck by Lightning - again (Richard)
Oh man, not Level 5 again. I'm finding this stage to be rather annoying to program. I just could not seem to get that darn lightning shooting right one bit the past times I did this game. Oh well, today I had another kind of brainwave to try and solve this dreaded and rather annoying problem. The trick is to create some values so that one cloud will shoot lightning, while the other two clouds *share* the other lightning bolt sprite. Therefore in theory, one sprite fires lightning constantly, while other clouds fire it once at a time. It would make the level much easier, but I can't use more than 8 sprites in this game, as multiplexing sprites is damn right too difficult for me to get to grips with.
So I created some new labels/variables that can be used to try and shoot lightning one at a time. The labels are Lightning1Set, Lightning2Set and CloudChoice. Where the "Get Ready" screen starts. I automatically Zero the Lightning perameters. Then inside the enemy logic source code I added a simple routine which was:
lda Lightning1Set
cmp #$01
beq .NotCloudStage1
lda CloudChoice
cmp #0
beq .SetOnCloud1
cmp #1
beq .SetOnCloud3
.NotCloudStage1 rts ;Error!
.SetOnCloud1
lda objpos+$05
sta objpos+$07
lda objpos+$04
sta objpos+$06
lda #1
sta Lightning1Set
lda #1
sta CloudChoice
rts
.SetOnCloud3
lda objpos+$0d
sta objpos+$07
lda objpos+$0c
sta objpos+$06
lda #1
sta Lightning1Set
lda #0
sta CloudChoice
rts
After entering this I assembled, compacted and executed the game in WinVice. Unfortunately, there was still a problem in the code. For some silly reason the lightning from one of the clouds just gets stuck for some reason. I have just realised what I have done wrong. I have forgotten to switch off the "Lightning1Set" label after the lightning has finished moving off screen.
After assembling and test running the source. All three clouds are able to fire lightning, however, there is still a slight couple of snags. The first one of which is that the lightning from cloud 2 constantly causes problems. I have a small theory in which could probably solve this little problem. And that is to do exactly the same type of routine as what was used with the previous lightning routine. Now I assemble, compact and run the game again. What would the result be like this time round I wonder? Well, the firing routine seems to work much better, but there's still a silly error in the game code. Lightning is still appearing from nowhere. Finally, it's working.
My step was to alter the lightning so that it will appear right in the middle of the clouds. Just a simple little ADC value will do the trick quite niceley. So I added before positioning the lightning sprites, LDA CLOUD_POSITION : CLC : ADC #$04 : STA LIGHTNING_POSITION :) Easy.
If I remember correctly, Wayne wanted me to remove the player/enemy collision routine where the clouds stage occur. Therefore if the player hits a cloud, there is no collision found. Well, at least that is something simple for me to master :) Consider it done.
Well, that will do for today as I am going out this afternoon. It is such a wonderful sunny day - Pub weather :) 'Til next time :o)
11th April 2010 - A new tune for the game (Richard)
Because of the problems with the previous music editor I used to compose music for this game. I decided to use Goat Tracker V2.68 and write some new music for the game. So I done 6 tunes. The first tune is the title music. The second was the in game music, then level complete ditty, followed by the Game Over ditty. Then the boss stage music finishing with the game complete tune. The music is exactly the same as the one I used for the original game, except for some additional changes which I made. After composing the music, I added
The tunes sounded pretty great for the game, much better than the version I composed using EMS V7.03 - Plus the music size is more optimized. I also added some nice effects to the music as well, which would suit this game quite nicely. Finally I imported the music into the game source code :o)
22nd April 2010 - Burnt Out! (Wayne)
Well again I feel like it has been yonks since I was here typing anything. I have nearly nailed the Disk Menu ( currently on version 4 ! ) and I have also been working on 3 SEUCK games. One of them is a surprise for Richard for his website, but I shall also be allowing Andrew to distribute it through SEUCKVAULT.com I also intend remixing ZIP ZAP ZOP as Richard didnt feel the original was substantial enough, this will now be called ZAP ZOP ZIP and will be a freebie for you disk users out there who buy the UITA disk version. I am also working on Wheelspin-a car game which will be the prototype for a game I started working on 3 years ago called BOUNCY CARS. I have a feeling that SEUCK has re-entered my life in a big way again!!! Had a major setback last week, while working on the game for Richard, I had a smell of paint for quite a while and chose to ignore it, I went to save it and everything went dead, it turns out my powerpack had burned out and died-DAMN YOU POWERPACK!!! Anyway, the good news my friend Paul lent me his, and the fantastic Andrew Fisher got me one sent to my house this week-FAB stuff!!! I also got the new demo of UITA this week, I have just emailed Richard about this now, things are coming along brilliantly, Level 5 is NEARLY there and Level 6 needs a little tweaking, am getting excited (again !!! ) :-> There have also been discussions about the disk/tape loader I want to do some retro type thing in the style of US GOLD, I did plan to do a UK GOLD loader but I had neglected to remember the UK GOLD channel - DOH!!! This would probably cause copyright infringements so we wont be doing that. Maybe we could do a "64 UK" loader with God save the Queen as the loading music (No way, I have something better and fancier in store - Rich). , what do you lot think? ( I Think Iam a genius - LOL )
13th May 2010 - A SEUCKer on Holiday (Wayne)
HELLO! Well this week I have been on
holiday I have managed to do some work on the SEUCK game that I wish
to include on the UITA disk, however as I was sat eating my Brekkie
this morning I realised I haven't any BONUS or End OF LEVEL BADDIES
in-DAMMIT! I intend to go back to this Saturday night and do some
more work. Last week I was working on my other SEUCK
game-WHEELSPIN, this of course is the Prototype for the rather
interesting game BOUNCY CARS! Both games are going to differ cos I'm
using Sideways SEUCK to create WHEELSPIN but BOUNCY CARS will be a
game written from scratch. Anyway boring yap aside, I have had
a mega game hunt day on Tuesday my dad ran me to Cleckheaton, I
caught a bus to Dewsbury and found a shop that did SNES games (
thanks for the help with the game prices Andrew ! ), then I went to
Batley (nothing there!). Then I went to Leeds and got some Retro
stuff from a shop there! Good Times!!!
16th
May 2010 - Catch up time (Richard)
Well, after the Sideways scrolling SEUCK compo 2010 prizes. I am finally ready to return to Up in the Air. Wayne got back to me a few weeks ago, regarding the enemies in level 6. He was quite pleased with level 6 so far, but there was still something missing. Wayne wanted the Gyrocopters to be able to shoot bullets. As I don't have knowledge about sprite multiplexors, I came up with an easier option, which is to make the last enemy sprite the bullet. So I took a look at the command tables for level 6, and zeroed the up and down control for enemy 5 so that it will move across, like a bullet. I also changed the frame for enemy 5 so that the enemy is of course a bullet. After a test run, I could see only 2 gyrocopters and 3 bullet sprites. Oops, ah well. I know what I done there, so I altered the level 6 startup parameters so that there are 4 Gyrocopters and one double bullet. After another test run I see 4 Gyrocopters and one bullet. Fantastic. Now it's up to me to make this bullet shoot out of a Gyrocopter after it leaves the border on the left.
I created a new label value, which is called .Sprite5IsBullet and for levels 1 - 5, I set .Sprite5IsBullet to be zero, and for level 6 .Sprite5IsBullet to be one. I assembled to check for errors. Thankfully, there were no errors during assembly. So now that I am happy with the label. It is time for me to add some new routines into the enemy sprite movement and enemy 5 sprite collision routine - depending on whether or not the sprite is a bullet. I added a little test bullet sprite routine, to make things quite more effective, so that the bullet object moves at the speed of '3'. I assembled the routine. Then I test run it. Seems to work okay. Then I added some additional routines that will correspond to the sprite that checks for which sprite can fire the bullet after the bullet has left the screen. I assembled the source - no errors. Then run the program again in WinVice to see what's happened this time round. I got all chosen sprites in the routine to fire bullets. BRILLIANT. Now all I need to do is disable the player being able to kill sprite 5 with it's bullets, and hopefully level 6 is finished - apart from the boss stage which needs to be added some time next week. Oh hang on, I have already done that :o)
20th May 2010 - SEUCK (Wayne)
This mornming I woke up at 6.30 ish ( dont know why ) after lying there a while I decided to do some work on the SEUCK game that I wish to include on the UITA disk, I think another week of work and this should be done! Also done more work on my other SEUCK game-WHEELSPIN, this now has four levels. Am trying to make sure that it contains differences to the final version that will become BOUNCY CARS. Am off back to Dewsbury today to see if I can get some more SNES games!!! God am such a geek LOL! :-> Gonna work on some more levels for UITA next week I think...