I returned to work on the jaguar version of "pineapple." Why? I don't know. I don't have an idea for the sheep game.
My pineapple code was a big huge mess, so the first order was to clean it up and make sure it still works. I put the ingame code in a sub and the title screen stuff in another sub. Then, I decided to add a sound effect for when a banana hits a wall. So I played around with the MIDI drum set and put it in. Next on the agenda was to make it not play when the banana is mo
So this took a few hours that I want back again. In the words of Hans Moleman: "I'd just waste them anyway."
I don't know what the giant sheep are up to. But one thing is certain: They're invading Ecuador.
I have finally understood a few things. Like how to define 8x8 squares and put them on the screen. I was so sleepy yesterday. I was only awake for two hours. I don't know what was wrong. I kept on being sleepy. And, since I was sleepy, no sense being awake and suffering
I've decided to dabble in Colecovision programming now that there's a Basic for it. This is what I have so far.
Yes, the name of the game is "I Sawed the Thawed Flawed Cod Fraud's Pod Wad."
The back story:
After being thawed, the flawed cod (who is actually a trout) swam downstream to a lake here. He brought along his favorite wad of pea pods, with which he plans to take over the world (and make everyone think he's a cod). You have to stop the cod fraud, but all you have is
So yesterday I worked on getting the ghost edible. And this morning I put in some remaining sound effects. And then I have it: It's all finished. Now we go through testing. Now I will reveal the final name I decided on naming it.
While I was bored, I began drawing a label for the game in case I was going to finish it. I didn't want to name it anything with "Pac" in it. I was thinking of something else when the name "The Horrible Ghosts of Uranus" popped into my head. So I drew a labe
So the game urged me. "Chrisssss....wooooork on meeeeee". But I did just a little work. The most horrible part, the part I dread working on due to its complexity, still remains.
I put the power dot in the game. If Pac-man, er, Mr. Yellow, eats it, the ghost turns blue. When the ghost is about to turn back red, he'll blink white thrice, then turn back red. That was sort of simple. And I have about 700 bytes left to see if I can enable collision detection on the ghost.
You'l
So I worked some more on Pac-Line. I fell asleep at about 3 or 4 a.m. unexpectedly and woke up at about 1 p.m. And then I went to work some more on it. I added the score and a ghost. I changed my lightbulb and tested version 4a on my Odyssey 2 and it works just fine. So now I will stop for a few days because I've been working on this a lot. I'll go back to working on some other project I have going on since I have way too many at the moment.
I've reached the half-way point in space, b
First the bad news: The light bulb in my room finally burned out. It had been on constantly for the past at least 3 years. I got one of those special bulbs that last longer. And boy they sure do. I got a bunch of the light bulbs I need (hopefully they will work). I can't change it now because it's almost 11 p.m. and so it's really dark in the house. So I'll wait until morning so I can see better. Man it's dark in here.
Now the good news. I worked on Pac-Line last night. I started at
So I've been wondering if I can make a halfway decent version of Paku Paku (a.k.a. "Pac-Line") on the Odyssey 2. If I were to do this, here's what I'd do:
I'd use the 12 characters for the dots. Here's a time when I wished for 16 characters. Of course I could use the quads, but...
I'd use quads for the score. Quads 0 and 1 for the score (8 characters), and Quads 2-3 spell out "Pac-Line" (also 8 characters.)
I'd make Pac-Man be sprite 0, the ghost be sprite 1, and the power
I got a visit from the elbow bump fairy. She must have come while I was sleeping last night. She left me with a bump on my elbow. I tried pinching it. It got a little bit of blood out onto my fingernails. I think it's just filled with it. And it keeps reforming. I used to have them come on my butt. Why they would start forming on my elbow is just weird.
I worked some more on my Virtual Boy game. It's called "Minigame Mayhem." It's a collection of little games. Right now I'm working o
Have you ever found yourself composing a song for a video game and when you're finished, you realize it doesn't really fit the mood you want? That's what happened to me. I had worked on this song for my Game Boy game Golden Pineapples. I called it done. Then the next day (today), I thought to myself "Wow. That song is really dark sounding and in a minor key." So I decided to make a more upbeat song for it. One in my songbook of songs I created a long time ago, long before I started video game ma
So I found my USB NES controller last night, so I decided to play some NES games. First, I wanted to see how many points I could score in SMB again. I must be slipping since I remember getting >800,000 in a NES HSC a long time ago.
Next I played SMB2. I found this sort of interesting and didn't know was possible: Mushroom blocks stopping for cherries.
Thus making one float in mid air for no reason. And apparently the continuity of the Mario series is all screwed up since
I just spent two hours failing to get a second enemy in. Everyone seems to want more enemies in Flying Hamburgers but every time I try to, I fail. So there's only one solution: Don't try any more. It's so frustrating. Why does programming have to be so mean and hard and STUPID? There will only be one enemy in the game at a time because I have to fail at everything and make nothing but crap games because I'm too stupid to make more complex games.
My arm just started hurting in a pecul
I've decided not to pursue publishing this game with 2Minds. That's not to mean I don't want it published at all, it just means I need to find someone else to make Game Gear games.
I made a few changes to the Flying Hamburgers game. I noticed that strawberry milkshakes (which are pink) shoot at you while all the other food that shoots at you are green. So I changed the strawberry milkshake which was pink to the same shade of green of the shooting sprites.
I also made it so the bu
I thought the boss screen in Flying Hamburgers looked rather sparse, so I decided to attempt to put some clouds in there. That was easy, but then I discovered the shots and the burger were going behind them. A whole bunch of sprite address rearranging then occurred and then I finally got the result I was looking for.
It's amazing what adding just four sprite tiles does to the look of a game.
I also fixed the blackness (or sometimes whiteness) that appeared to the strawberr
So the past couple of days I began work on a version of Pac-Line for the Intellivision.
Yesterday my eye hurt really bad, yet I still went to the used game store. I walked out with Blues Brothers 2000 for the N64 because I didn't see anything else to catch my eye and I wanted to support. I saw the first issue of Nintendo Power in there. Too bad they wanted $200 for it! They also had some Fun Club News issues, the cheapest one being $40. And then I went to Popeye's and got some delici
I discovered that the explosion sound didn't play when the autofire was happening. So I made it so you can't shoot until the sfx is done playing. Then I had to shorten each sfx so it doesn't sound and play awful. I also made it so if you touch the boss, you'll die. This was another change that had to be done with autofire. You can still get up right to the boss's face and autofire, but you'll risk getting hit by one of the boss's onion rings. I changed the colors to level 6's background so they'
This morning was spent working on adding autofire. To use it, you hold down the button. Someone suggested that. I ran into some more bugs when I put it in, but I think they may be gone now. I thought about adding some lines in the grass, but I decided I didn't want it to look really busy, so I didn't. I'm using 15 colors, so if I wanted to, I could have even made them a different color.
I noticed the life counter was flashing 0 for a frame or so when it went to the game over screen.
So there was a 20% eclipse here. Not anything like the 2017 one. I went outside with some 2017 glasses to see if I could see it. It doesn't look amazing over here. I heard on the news it's supposed to end at 12:19, but the peak was at 11:25. So I went out there and it wasn't impressive at all. Oh well.
I made some changes to the hamburger game. Level 5 especially. I changed the background. I made it look like this:
I added some trees and more mountains behind them. I thoug
I decided to go back to working on Game Gear Flying Hamburgers even though I deemed it finished. I thought of something I could do. So I worked on making the onion rings not disappear during the boss screen. I made it work. It got harder. And it's a good thing I worked on it.
During my other testing, I found a major bug. I don't know what it was at first. I tried various things until I discovered that if the enemy is shot and his projectile keeps going, it gets a new enemy at that pl
I got a bouncing banana. It bounces around the screen. Then I got the crazy idea of a Tapeworm-like level. I got it able to do this as well, but with a little extra code. I don't know how much code the Jaguar can handle for each vsync. I also got my .raw files to play correctly.
So now with a banana bouncing around the screen, the next step is to add the pineapple in. So that's what I'll do next. I plan to have odd-numbered levels be the open field and even-numbered levels be this. I
Last night I played my Jaguar for the first time in a long time. I played some Wolfenstein 3D. I discovered something: The Jaguar has battery backup capabilities! I was poking around the number pad and when I pressed 1 it said "SAVE TO FILE 1". So when I was done, I turned the Jag off and back on again and sure enough, it saved my game at the level I had left off at. I discovered the map comes on if you press 5. I played it in God mode because I'm not very good at games like this.
So
For a while, I haven't been doing my comics, so the website was on a temporary pause. I'll be back at it again on April 7 and again on April 14. It makes me wonder how the cartoonists who do the comic strips think up new ideas over and over again for each day. Perhaps that's why Gary Larson quit. If you're doing a new strip each day, they can't all be good. I just drew, scanned, cleaned up and colored a couple of comic strips and if I think of any more, then that'll be great. But I've been doing
For as long as I've been making music compositions, I've always used Anvil Studio. I thought I'd change things up a little and compose a new epic song using a program called "Aria Maestosa". It's similar in that you can place notes on a bar by clicking on it, but there are many other different changes I could use if I could understand them. One of the more frustrating options omitted is you can't change the key signature mid-song. I just spent 45 minutes trying to find a way but I couldn't. So I
I have been working on Pot o' Gold a lot today. I got so angry at it because I was trying to make the trees 2 tiles instead of just one. It kept repeating the sound of the tree getting over and over again. So when that was solved, I'm trying to use channel 3 for the takeaway of the trees. All I can get just now is a soft hiss. I'd like something more like a "pop!" type sound effect. I'll try to work on it some more when I get all the sprites in.
I wanted to continue making some mini
Awhile back, I had this idea of a grand Odyssey 1 project called "I Need to Escape the Aliens." Then I forgot about it. Until last night. I woke up at about 4 a.m. with a fully fledged idea for an Odyssey 1 game. But I was too tired to get up, so I went back to sleep. I woke up at around noon. A few hours later, I decided to try to flesh out the idea to see what is possible and if I could add anything to it. The second (or perhaps third?) game doesn't need an overlay, but I think I'll make one f
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