Now rather than stop here. I thought I should do a bit more tweaking/fixing. This time it was time for the bonus stages. The bonus stage was way too hard because the mines move way too fast. Instead of going up to 8x speed, I set the final speed for the mines to 4x. That should make things more simple. Another problem which this stage has is that the mines' y position seems to go overboard into the status bar and also if they go too high. they will end up going off screen. I needed to restrict the positions for those mines. So I set the top position as $48 min and bottom position $d2 max, so that those mines will not exceed the limit.

The random tables needed adjusting a little, because of the mines overlapping each other all the time. Well, it cannot really be helped much because avoiding this from happening when mines bounce up and down is extremely difficult, but I altered the randomizer routine to link it with level 1's randomizer routine and sorted the problem out slightly. Unfortunately the mines are still overlapping, but it cannot really be helped.

The final task this time was to add a routine for where the player survives each bonus round. The player should get a reward. So I added a routine which will give the player an extra life if it has less than 4 lives, else no extra life will be given. I tested the routine, but it seemed to have reversed the print extra life sub on screen. So I reversed the position of the routine that does the extra sub display. Now I'll do a major backup of the project and call it a day with this. Will do some more work on the project later on this week or next week.

13th August 2008 - It takes 2 baby!

Now that level 4 is now finished, and the bonus round is sort of finished, I decided to work on level 6, the sea horses stage. There was a suggestion in the google docs which was to make 2 hits for the sea horses before they could die. So I altered the enemy collision routine slightly, which is something like this:

IF STAGE = 7 (Stage 7 = level 6 and 20)
  THEN
       NO OF HITS TO KILL ENEMIES 1,2,5= 2
   ELSE
       NO OF HITS TO KILL ENEMIES 1,3,5 = 1
END IF

As well as altering the collision routine, I also had to add 3 new labels that correspond to the sea horses, so that they get 2 shots. I named those:

ENEMY1_LIFE
ENEMY2_LIFE
ENEMY3_LIFE

and used

DEC ENEMY1_LIFE
LDA ENEMY 1_LIFE
CMP #$00
BEQ KILLENEMY1
RTS

KILLENEMY1:

LDA #$01
STA ENEMY1_DEAD
RTS

and I used the same method for the other three sea horses.

The next thing to fix was the max Y positions for sea horses because the sprites were also going over the status panel. It seemed that I did not set the correct Maximum Y=position. Seems I used #$D8, which was too close to the panel, so I used #$CE instead, which was much better.

Nothing else to do on this level now. So I'm off to bed. Until next time :o)

16th August 2008 - More and more hard work

Quite a big chunk of the project has been done today. Some major bugs fixed and also some game tweaks. Quite a bit to mention here today. Still it should be worth the read anyway.

First of all, I decided to update the counters for the levels from 1 - 14 to the new counter settings. The timers mainly required time increases for the first 12 levels, and a bit of timer decreasing for the other levels. I shall alter the oxygen settings to levels 15-25 either tomorrow or some other time. Once the timers are done I should hopefully have most of the game finished. Just the randomizer bugs to fix and also the guardian stage.

Level 2 and level 8 had problems with the animation. What seemed to have happened is that after the player drops a depth charge on to an enemy sub or an enemy fish, the explosion animation does animate properly. So I had to browse through the code to find out what was causing the problem for those two sea wolf style stages. Seems that the problem was that I accidentally homed the sprite which was being animated as explosion by setting zero to sprite 2's Y-position. So I removed the zero sprite routine from where it should not have been and then compiled the game again. This time the animation worked excellently well. I was overjoyed now that major bug has finally been fixed. It was bugging me for a long time :)

Now's the time to move on to the next problem. Seems that the enemy fish in level 9 was animating badly, so I had to alter the data tables for the fish, so I browsed at the sprite animation which Frank had prepared for me using Sensible Software's Shoot 'em Up Construction Kit (SEUCK). After taking a look at the SEUCK sprite animation I altered the data table in my code for the game's sprite animation. I recompiled the source, and tested it in WinVice again. The animation was still not correct, so I made some more alterations to the data table for that enemy fish. Now it works slightly accurate enough.


Still on level 9's updates. The next thing which I read about this level (In the Google documents) is that Frank suggests that the jelly fish enemy should be replaced with a different enemy, due to the direction it is moving. So I changed this enemy into an octopus. A pink octopus in fact. I tried purple at first, but sort of clashed with the game background.

Now on to level 13. Seems there was a problem with the background colour scheme. The level used a pink/red mix, which clashed with the swimmer's colour. So I altered the colour of the background. At first I tried the green scheme, but unfortunately the background clashed with the enemy fish's colour so I changed the colour scheme to an orange and brown colour scheme. It suits this level quite nicely. Secondly, I got the enemy fish bobbing in this stage, to make things more interesting. Looks a very nice level now!


20th August 2008 - Level 6 - again!

Well, I have been trying to fix level 6 but the bad news is that I forgot how I fixed it properly. I got the sea horses positioning after killed fixed. I have been trying to fix the octopus bounce, but at the moment it looks off. Maybe I can get those fixed tomorrow. Then level 13 again. Bah!

23rd August 2008 - Level 6 and level 13 fixed and a better randomizer created

Well, on with the Sub Hunter project and this time I done some fixes for level 6 and also level 13. I also worked on a new randomizer and position compare routine, according to the level that the player is taking part in. Looks as if I am getting closer and closer to the end once the new randomizer routine was updated, I linked the randomizer routine to the rest of the remaining levels that required i, except for the Shark Attack stages, which did not really need it.

Now that the updated randomizer routine has been added and sort of correct  the next thing I done was checked on the google docs to see what things I needed to fix. Seems that the Shark Attack stages are all right, apart from level 18. I have also been working on some major update to all the harder levels, to make things more tougher to play. Well now, most of the game is finally finished (I think) but of course there are still one or two things that I will need to fix, including the game's bonus stage. But that can wait until some other day.

For the final trick before I call it a day I done the following:

• Fixed randomizer routine for most levels (Except for the Shark Attack stages)
• Updated the enemy colours (Level 6 uses cyan octopus and grey sea horses and colours are different for a later level)
• Made a new bob sinus for the octopus in level 6
• Triggered later stages to make them harder (i.e. Level 1's fish is slow and recycled level 1's stage where level 14's fish is faster)
• Killed the enemy fish bobbing for level 14 - one sacrifice due to lack of memory left in the code.
• Boss shark stage now in the shark attack caves.
• Fixed collision for Shark Attack stages
  

And basically that's the fixes done today.

24th August 2008 - Game and title screen now Finished, I think ;o)

I have been working really hard today to get as much fixed as possible (Those of which needed a major fix up). Seems I have succeeded - I think. First of all there was a problem related to level 1's randomizer. It seemed that there were no enemy subs coming on screen. I realized what happened. Seems that I had put a REM command next to a routine that randomizes the positions of the enemy subs.

Once that was repaired I worked on with the sea wolf stage. Seems that when a phase is done in this stage, the second sprite does not go off screen. So I fixed that one nice and easy.

Thirdly there was a major problem with the bonus stages. The mines had a mind of their own and they did not randomize, so I fixed this problem by updating the bonus stage to randomize well like with previous levels. The mines were still bunched together, so I altered the default start positions so that when they are on screen, they are more spaced out. I had removed the mine's bounce routine before I done that. Seems I managed to fix the mines randomizer quite nicely. So now I brought back the bouncing mine routine. Looks a lot better now.

Now it was time for the shark attack fixing stage. First of all, the red colour scheme looked crap for this stage, so I turned it into a nice blue cave instead. When playing the level itself It seems that this stage was way too easy to play, so I decided to make some alterations to it. First of all I adjusted the minimum x-stop position for the player's sub. That was to make things slightly harder. Secondly, there was something else missing for this stage. The shark needed some protection by the fish. At first when the player is shooting, the player's bullet goes right past the enemy fish. So I quickly added a routine, which checks for a collision with all enemy fish. So if the player's bullet hits the enemy fish, the enemy fish will eat it, instead of the bullet going across the screen. Now that made this stage much harder, but not impossible, because I still manage to defeat the shark without a life being lost.


Just some minor tweaks now. The sprite animation. I took a look at the animation frames from the SEUCK animation snapshot which Frank had sent me. Seems that in the game the animation needed some tweaking, so I altered the sprite's animation tables so that the animation for some of the enemies matched the SEUCK animation. First of all, I animated the Jellyfish, as the main animation for the jellyfish was not good in the main game. So I altered the table and animation routine. I managed to get the right sprite animation for this stage. That was great. Now I altered the animation frames to the other enemies that required better animation, and also succeeded there too. Then I finalized points for the enemies shot. Now (fingers crossed) the game is finished.

Now it was time for me to finish off the scroll text and update the title screen. First of all, I entered a new scroll text, then converted it for use with the game project. I slowed the scroll text down a little. My next step was to redesign the presentation lines. I had to make some new clusters for the title screen. So I used the Action Replay screen editor to alter the text, colours and also added some more animated chars to the screen. I saved the colour and screen data and replaced the original colour and screen data files with new colours. I then tested the front end and the game. Looks fantastic and there seems to be no problems. I think the main part of the project is finally finished and that I'll be ready to work on the intro/story line of the game. Should make things interesting :o)


26th August 2008 - Nope, not finished yet, new bugs to fix!

Seems that there are still bugs and some other improvements to have been made. Frank has done a new Google document which is the Sub Hunter Final fixes/improvements. I went through the docs and seems that lots of high priority fixes to be made. Oh no :o( Heheheh. Anyway I didn't do much today, just fixed the first top priority problem.

Level 1 had a problem where enemies were placed in random Y positions. That was good, but the problem was that the bobbing enemy fish appeared at the very top of the sea surface and then disappeared into the raster split which turns them off. So it looks as if enemy fish are vanishing and coming back again. Not good. Not good at all. It took me about a couple of hours to try and work out what was causing this problem. I got really frustrated because the code was correct and there was nothing wrong with the randomizer routine. Finally I discovered my problem. Nothing wrong with the code whatsoever. It seems that my major error was one of the bytes in the random positions data table. I used $40, which puts sprites at the top above the raster split. So I replaced it with $50 and it solved the problem.


28th August 2008 - Slower, Faster

This evening was another interesting fun evening with the project. Well, creative I suppose. It has been said that the Sea Wolf style stages seem to lack in random speed for the enemy fishes or enemy subs, depending on the current Sea Wolf stage which the player is on. So I created a few routines to randomize the enemy speed and then implemented the new speed into the the stages. This will work after an enemy leaves the screen. Not only will it appear at a newer position, but it will either zoom across at a fast speed or a slow speed. It will depend on the calculation for each fish or sub.

The speed of the fish and also the subs were successful but there was still another problem. It seems that in the Sea Wolf stages, the random Y positions seem to have looked a mess for this stage. So I had to create an exclusive new stage random data table and also a new position randomizer that was exclusive for the Sea Wolf stages. This did not take too long to update and fix. So that was good news.

Finally, I did not like the Get Ready bouncer much and I wanted to save some memory, so I removed the bounce sinus data and also the bounce sinus routine from the code. Much better now.

30th August 2008 - A full day of more high priority fixes

Well seems I have been very busy with this Sub Hunter project today. I have been browsing through the high priority section in the final fixes to see what needed to be done. Well, a very bugged game would not be good for a player. Especially if they could end up with a random crash or something stupidly unexpected would cause problems for the player. Anyway let's not gabble on with this paragraph and just jump on to the next paragraph which consists of more bug fix banter.

First of all, on top of the list was something which I never done before with any of my 6502 programmed games, and that is rewarding the player an extra life for a certain amount of points scored. Frank suggested this to be a high priority so I took a look at his formula/hint to make a high score. It reads something like:

REM *** INITIALIZE VARIABLE AT THE START OF EACH NEW GAME
NEXTLIFEAT = 50000

REM *** CHECK IF EXTRA LIFE SHOULD BE AWARDED EACH TIME CURRENTSCORE IS INCREASED WITH POINTS ETC
REM *** MAKE THIS A SUB ROUTINE CALLED JUST AFTER A SCORE INCREASE OCCURS.
IF CURRENTSCORE >= NEXTLIFEAT THEN
     NEXTLIFEAT = NEXTLIFEAT + 50000
     LIVES = LIVES + 1
END IF

Now then how was I to turn this into 6502 assembly code? The second question was how am I to work out the routine. I was spending about 10 minutes thinking about how I could come up with this routine? Well after the 10 minutes thinking time, I come up with a perfect solution. An invisible scoring routine, which will read the score and if the second char in the six chars is read as 5, I call a routine that will award the player an extra life (If number of lives is below 4 else the routine ignored. Maybe I should make it that if lives = 4 then player gets awarded a temporary shield, but I'll have to wait and see what Frank thinks about this ingenious little idea of mine :o)

My second fix which I had to do was update the swimmer's immunity. Seems that when playing level 13 of the game, the swimmer gets killed by the subs and fish too frequent before it even reaches a certain position on screen. So I altered the routine where after the swimmer passes $2C pixels, the immunity is turned off. This makes level 13 slightly easier and fun.

The third fix was to do with the oxygen status. When the player loses oxygen, a life is lost but the oxygen counter does not freeze while the player dies. It is always a good idea for the oxygen counter to reset the current level's default value after the death sequence for the player has finished. So I had to create a new routine that will check if the player is dead and whether or not the player had run out of oxygen. I tested this feature and it worked nicely. There was still another problem with the oxygen counter. It seems that the counter gives 99 points extra to it instead of resetting as default. I found the silly problem and I fixed by changing the two 99 digits to 00. I tested it, and now it seems present and correct.

Now it was time for me to take a look at the bugs in level 2, where there was no baby shark coming on screen. Seems there was nothing wrong with the code apart from that I forgotten to randomize the shark's position. I also cut the routine from level 8 shorter to use level 2's code, because I did not need level 8's longish routines, so I cut those down a bit. Another bug in level 2 is that the explosion/bubble animation were not correct after time runs out or after the last fish or sub is killed. The colour was incorrect and it required looking at. Seems I was trying to activate more than one animation on the same sprite, where explosions mucked up. I fixed this problem now the animation seem to work nicely.

There was also another problem with level 8. There was an unnecessary bug where the player is constantly exploding and losing lives when a certain enemy sub goes past. There was a weird problem with the collision routine, so with a quick fix it is done. The second problem was that anytime the player is killed the player was still able to drop bullets. So I tweaked the routine that was causing the problems, so that the player will not be able to drop bullets when it is going through the explosion death sequence.

Now on to the bonus stage. It looked as if it could do with some improvements where the player collects a gem to score 1000 points. Well it seems to me that this collectable item in the game lacks animation, so I decided to add a new sprite animation frame table for the game and an standalone animation routine. Now when the player collects the gem, the gem will use the player sub's explosion frame and then display the 1000 points sprite for a short time, then all is offset. Now the bonus stage is (hopefully) finally finished.

Finally, the title screen text go realigned so that everything is centred.

31st August 2008 - Twice the effect, twice the sound

Frank suggested that the game would need some sound effects for it, so I dug out the MONASE V1.0 sound effects editor and I created some sound effects for the game. The sounds sounded really cool and MON style. I saved the built player to $9700 and then implemented the sound effects into the game's code. Sadly the SFX player wasn't compatible with my code, so all I could do with the cool SFX is produce a demo featuring those effects, for the Sub Hunter goodies disk.


However that did not stop me from putting sound effects on to the game. I dug out the Cult SFX editor and created some new sound effects and then I added those in to the game code. However before I could do exactly that, I had to update the positions for the title screen code and also the end screen code. Unfortunately I was very limited for memory, because most of it got used up around the whole M/C addresses. So for now, I removed the title code and also the end screen code. Now I added the sound effects which I made using the Cult SFX editor and relocated the player to $9700, added routines to play sound effects - the smallest way where possible. Then I tested the sound effects. Seems to work, despite the sounds sound nothing like MON style sounds, but they will have to do for now, because space is very limited. Plus the sound effects player is compatible with my code.



Now that the sound effects are working (I can improve my new SFX to something better later on this week with the editor as I still have to SFX source). Now it was time for me to add the end screen and title screen code back into the program. I had to move the routines around. A bit of brainstorming was required, but I finally succeeded this problem with thanks to adding some relocator routines for the end screen code, that will transfer data from an illegal address ($D800) and then pasting it to $1600-$1A00.

Finally, I added a routine that will allow the player to chose between sound effects or music, using left/right on the joystick in the title screen. The routine works nicely and now hopefully the majority of this main game is finished, just some small minor tweaks which wont be memory consuming. :o)


1st September 2008 - New look front end and making sounds

Frank saw the new title screen with no scroll text, but sadly it looked pretty boring as there was no scroll text, so he created a new mock-up of the title screen design. So I redesigned the title screen and added a blue border at the bottom of the screen with some Cyan text and added a double lined separator at the top and the bottom of the border. I also added the Psykozone Music and SFX sprites into the title screen, for the availability of allowing the player to choose between music or game sound effects. I showed (what I thought was) the finished front end. He liked what he saw, but found a small mistake in the title screen. The lines were too thick. Seemed that I copied the plan when the screen shot which Frank designed was not drawn to scale. Still that is an easy enough job. I can correct the lines in Cuneiform, but I'll do that some other time.

Although it was getting pretty late and I have to get up early for work at the busy warehouse, I have come across a perfect idea to create some sound effects. I wasn't all that impressed with the SFX editor, so I decided to recreate the game sound effects by programming my own sound effects player and data tables. So I started programming a simple fast interrupt routine (IRAQ) and then built my own routines to initialize and play the sound effects that I'm programming right now. First of all I was looking up some information to make filters because for the player shooting, I wanted to use a filter sweep. After experimenting a  little, I ended up doing a good filter sweep sound for the Commodore 64. This was a perfect sound for the player sub shooting depth charges.

The next sound which I wanted to do was the explosion sound for the player's sub. Well, an echoed drum-beat style sound would suit the explosion sound and I did exactly that. I set the low and high pulse rate as 88, so I had a perfect sound for the drum style explosion effect. Brilliant result.

Now before I go to bed I decide to make two more sounds, which are related to the swimmer rescued and also another sound the swimmer's death. I mixed wave forms and the arpeggios for the sound of the swimmer saved and tried a little scream effect for the swimmer's death. The sounds turned out pretty cool. I would have programmed some more sounds, but sadly time for bed. Maybe tomorrow or Wednesday.

Night, night!

2nd September 2008 - More blips and bloops

It is a late session today. Only spent half an hour to 45 minutes to finish off my sound effects for Sub Hunter.  I worked on the sounds for gem collected (Bonus stage), which was using a sort of arpeggio score. The extra life sound, which is a simple 'ting ' sound. I also worked on the enemy explosions. The enemy subs explosions sound the same as the player's sub explosion, except for that the enemies use a lower pitch to it. Now most interesting of them all is probably the explosion sound effects for the sea creatures. As those sounds are m mixed pitches with some mixed effects. Now the sound effects for the game are finished.

3rd September 2008 - A little more fixing

I only done a a couple of tiny jobs today. First of all, I fixed the lines in the blue border for the Sub Hunter title screen. The char was meant to have 2 thin lines, not one thin and one thick. So I corrected the charset in Cuneiform then replaced the charset file. Looks much better now. One task done, on to another quick task.

 Now that my sound effects were finished, I decided to add the new sounds into the game. So now, I had to assemble my SFX player (Minus IRAQ interrupt) to $9700. Well, that was easily done. The second thing which I had to do was alter the parameters of the player/swimmer collision as it still wasn't quite right. (See what I said earlier). So I updated the collision co-ordinates so that I had an accurate reading for player/swimmer collision.

Well, I shall now take a couple days rest and do some more fixing/updates this weekend and hope that it will be all finished and ready for testing so that I can work on the intro/storyline. Which will be somewhat different. Tomorrow + Friday, Time to play some C64 games.

6th September 2008 - Could this finally be the end of fixing?

Yet a lot more fixing has been done today. So hopefully the final fixing stage of the main game is finished. (Fingers crossed).

First of all the sound effects were required to be updated. There was a problem with the filter sweep effect, so I updated this effect so that instead of using a filter glide, it uses a standard filter. I updated the filter effect and imported it back into the game project file. Once that was done, I had to create some routines that will play sound effects depending on the type of enemy that is being shot. So I updated the routines so that they could play effects.

- Player shoot
- Player explode
- Level start
- Enemy subs explode
- Enemy fish explode
- Swimmer rescued
- Swimmer killed
- Extra life
- Bonus stage gem collected

One major problem that I had when I implemented those sound effects into the game, were some silly interruptions occurring continuously. So I altered the INITFX routine, so that all sounds are set to zero. That way I could have nice clean sounds playing in the background. Much perfect .I'm happy with this.

The next part of the bug fixing/improvements phase was improving the boss shark. It has been reported that the shark's collision was not good as the collision could not read the whole shark. So I added a new calculation to the shark collision and it worked a treat. My next step was to update the boss shark's spitting fish timer. So I created some new routines to make the timers more interesting. The rapid firing of the enemy fish was updated according to the big boss shark's behaviour. The first part, is where the baby sharks will be spat out less frequently. After 10 hits, the behaviour of the shark changes. The fish get spat out slightly more frequently and faster, and after another several hits, the sharks get spat out more frequently and faster. Finally the final part, the boss shark starts moving towards the player's sub, and still spitting the fish at a fast and frequent speed.

Now the boss shark stage is finally fixed I had some minor updates to do to the game. One of which had a major bug that could lose points in the game. On level 6 the player's bullet seems to appear in a strange Y-position when it hit an enemy. I found what was causing this problem. It seems that level 6's bullet collision routine was missing a poke so that the player's bullet was homed off screen after it had hit a sea horse. The routine is now fixed.

Now some other routines, which I also fixed:

- Move the PRESS FIRE chars to a correct position for the end sequence.
- Fix the jump address from the end screen back to the title screen
- Update the clocks and oxygen counters in the game according to the testing documentation issue by Frank
- Fixed the charset for the title screen's presentation.

I am very pleased with the overall result. Hopefully now, the game is finally finished and ready for play testing.

7th September - Intro time

Finally I have nothing else to do to the main game. So now I worked on with the intro story line. First of all, I had to create a new folder, because this time round I wanted to work on the intro using a much more easier cross assembler known as ACME. The first thing I had to do was to extract screens and bitmaps to specific load address to the project folder. Once I done that. I exported the graphics, charset and the rest of the data to the project folder. Next I had to compress all 3 bitmaps, by using the Exomizer level cruncher mode. This reduced the bitmaps to size and I assembled the Exomizer decruncher routine for use with the intro (Magnus will be credited in the final release) to $3800. Then I started programming.

The first thing which I had to do was program a double IRAQ interrupt for the first part. At first I did not get it to do much except to play "Sinful" by Drax (This is a tune which Frank selected for this intro). Now I created a few routines that will decrunch the picture and display it on screen. Seems to work okay.

Now this looked a bit boring, so I checked through the text Frank gave me, and I added some transitions and texts on to the screen for each picture. Then worked on the intro animation sequence. Finally added at TO BE CONTINUED at the end. That's all for today.