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New 32k XB Game:ZOMBi (work in progress)


Sinphaltimus

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GAME IS CURRENTLY EARLY ACCESS ALPHA version. No ETA on Beta.

 

NEW VERSION 0.34

 

 

 

How To Play:

 

About: This is meant to be a semi casual zombie survival game to escape a skyscraper. Play for score (session high score coming soon)

 

Combat: A melee attack is a swing attack that covers the space directly in front and behind the player. You get one attack per inventory item.

Joystick down = ranged attack. Coming soon, no effect at close range (need melee)

 

ZEDS: Will grab you and attack you. Hold a direction to escape, try hitting with melee, break away as fast as you can.

 

DODGE: You can attempt to dodge zeds by jumping past them (joystick button or J)

 

LOOTING: Will slow you down, jump past it to dodge the loot if you need to (for future versions when Zombies run)

 

Controls:

X=Quit, R=Reset, J and Controller Button = Jump, Joystick Left/Right moves left/right,

Joystick up = melee attack -

 

Notes: Melee attacks will destroy loot including hearts.

Don't mash the jump button, press and hold. It is possible to run over holes or run past loot without picking it up. Technically it's a COINC detection issue. I call it a feature. Looting while running? You're gonna miss a thing or two. Running over a hole? It's just a high risk jump. The crumbling floor on each side of the hole? Be careful of loose gravel, you can slip and fall.

 

Backstory: It's the zombie apocalypse. Hordes of the living dead are roaming the streets, you hear a helicopter and climb the tallest building level by crumbling level. You get to the roof and just as you make it to the end, the roof door is barred and you hear the helicopter motors fading in to the distance. Then you hear another sound. The sound of the dead creeping in and closer. They must have followed you. Now, it's time to get out. Escape to the ground floor street level. Good Luck.

 

V 0.34 changes:

 

Added placeholders for moving zombies.

Changed level count to reflect count down.

Changed ExX in GUI to Level

99 levels to complete,

Optimized a lot of code (Still a lot more to do)

Moved development to TidBit (see source in zip)

Console Ram: 11840 Stack, 24488 Program.

v33 after OLD (load): 1554 program free.

v33 after RUN: 10039 stack free, 730 program free.

v34 after OLD (load): 3797 program free.

v34 after RUN: 10644 stack free, 2829 program free.

ZOMBi036.zip

post-47352-0-46902900-1475886693_thumb.png

Edited by Sinphaltimus
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Very nice. :)

Thanks. I've now seen the light with TidBit however it's not perfect and I'm concerned with some of its translation errors. Now that I have my game rewritten and stable, the issues with TidBit are easier to overcome.

 

See my entry on 9/11/16 at 3:26pm in this thread for more details..

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/172765-basic-xb-translator-tidbit/page-7

Edited by Sinphaltimus
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I contacted him privately at first sign of trouble but it was due to lingering line numbers I forgot to remove and the way TidBit handles them. So an update is on the way. Matt suggested I post issues to the community as well on the tb thread. Really a bunch of top notch folks here. This community is awesome.

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GAME IS CURRENTLY EARLY ACCESS ALPHA version. No ETA on Beta.

NEW VERSION 0.35

zip.gif Zomb035.zip 15.89KB
(TidBit Source, Extended BASIC text and Cassic99 DSK)

How To Play:

About: This is meant to be a semi casual zombie survival game to escape a skyscraper. Play for score (session high score coming soon)

Combat: A melee attack is a swing attack that covers the space directly in front and behind the player. You get one attack per inventory item.
Joystick down = ranged attack. Coming soon, no effect at close range (need melee)

ZEDS: Will grab you and attack you. Hold a direction to escape, try hitting with melee, break away as fast as you can.

DODGE: You can attempt to dodge zeds by jumping past them (joystick button or J)

LOOTING: Will slow you down, jump past it to dodge the loot if you need to (for future versions when Zombies run)

Controls:
X=Quit, R=Reset, J and Controller Button = Jump, Joystick Left/Right moves left/right,
Joystick up = melee attack -

Notes: Melee attacks will destroy loot including hearts.
Don't mash the jump button, press and hold. It is possible to run over holes or run past loot without picking it up. Technically it's a COINC detection issue. I call it a feature. Looting while running? You're gonna miss a thing or two. Running over a hole? It's just a high risk jump. The crumbling floor on each side of the hole? Be careful of loose gravel, you can slip and fall.

Backstory: It's the zombie apocalypse. Hordes of the living dead are roaming the streets, you hear a helicopter and climb the tallest building level by crumbling level. You get to the roof and just as you make it to the end, the roof door is barred and you hear the helicopter motors fading in to the distance. Then you hear another sound. The sound of the dead creeping in and closer. They must have followed you. Now, it's time to get out. Escape to the ground floor street level. Good Luck.

V 0.35 changes:

Continued code optimizing.
Console Ram: 24488 Program.
v34 after OLD (load): 3797 program free.
v34 after RUN: 2829 program free.
v35 after OLD (load): 6734 PROGRAM FREE
v34 after RUN: 6590 PROGRAM FREE
Edited by Sinphaltimus
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There are so many exciting things happening in both camps right now. On the TI side, I'm stoked for the FPGA Pip.... board. And an F18A upgrade. I think that will let us use an SD card as a hard drive? If not, I need to find something that can accomplish this for me or find a scsi controller for the ti and get a scsi2sd adapter. That and the vampire II board for the Amiga in development. I plan to develop programs for the TI as I start learning assembly and the Amiga is going to be a multimedia workhorse in conjunction with my PC. Anyway, I think I uploaded the wrong code last update here. So I've got fixed code now, just final testing and will upload shortly.

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GAME IS CURRENTLY EARLY ACCESS ALPHA version. No ETA on Beta.

NEW VERSION 0.36

zip.gif Zombti036.zip 15.81KB
(TidBit Source, Extended BASIC text and Cassic99 DSK)

How To Play:

About: This is meant to be a semi casual zombie survival game to escape a skyscraper. Play for score (session high score coming soon)

Combat: A melee attack is a swing attack that covers the space directly in front and behind the player. You get one attack per inventory item.
Joystick down = ranged attack. Coming soon, no effect at close range (need melee)

ZEDS: Will grab you and attack you. Hold a direction to escape, try hitting with melee, break away as fast as you can.

DODGE: You can attempt to dodge zeds by jumping past them (joystick button or J)

LOOTING: Will slow you down, jump past it to dodge the loot if you need to (for future versions when Zombies run)

Controls:
X=Quit, R=Reset, J and Controller Button = Jump, Joystick Left/Right moves left/right,
Joystick up = melee attack -

Notes: Melee attacks will destroy loot including hearts.
Don't mash the jump button, press and hold. It is possible to run over holes or run past loot without picking it up. Technically it's a COINC detection issue. I call it a feature. Looting while running? You're gonna miss a thing or two. Running over a hole? It's just a high risk jump. The crumbling floor on each side of the hole? Be careful of loose gravel, you can slip and fall.

Backstory: It's the zombie apocalypse. Hordes of the living dead are roaming the streets, you hear a helicopter and climb the tallest building level by crumbling level. You get to the roof and just as you make it to the end, the roof door is barred and you hear the helicopter motors fading in to the distance. Then you hear another sound. The sound of the dead creeping in and closer. They must have followed you. Now, it's time to get out. Escape to the ground floor street level. Good Luck.

V 0.36 changes:

Continued code optimizing.
Also, Last version had label issues. It was a typo issue on my part using TidBit. I didn't think I uploaded that version since it was fixed prior to uploading v0.35.
So here's 0.36 without the game crushing error.
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  • 3 weeks later...

The game looks like it is coming on well. The graphics of the jumping man is pretty cool too.

 

Keep up the good work, especially given that you are learning a fairly advanced level of coding on a machine which offers many challenges, such as speed limitations, memory limitations, sound limitations, graphics & colour limitations and a poor IDE which today many developers take for granted and only need to worry on the gameplay.

 

What we contribute to the TI 99/4A community will keep it alive.

 

I recommend that as part of the game you will have one page that explains the aim of the game and the keys to use to navigate around.

 

We owe much of our coding hobby to people like Tursi (Classic99), RalphB (XDT99/FlashROM Cart), Rasmus(Great games) and Lee(FBFort) who contribute with their tools, tricks and tips and are always around to assist us.

 

In view of the above, I am hereby solemnly committing myself to find the time to launch a small game too, to be enjoyed during Christmas and add to the TI collection. I was stuck for approx. 5 months to finish off its intro music but now I finally unblocked thanks to a music composer friend of mine who took the time to jot down some notes for me to key in into TI :) Hopefully by end of week I will type these in and see how it sounds.

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Thank you very much, this community and its members are certainly top notch.

 

I do intend to have a title screen and an instructions screen and music. The quality of each depending on what I'm left with when done.

 

I've been held up on hardware mods each weekend. With that winding down soon, I'll be able to get back to working on ZOMBi daily. Almost all of the core mechanics are in then I will work on performance issues and finally the screens and music.

 

Although I have no idea how to do music as a stream (background sound track). I'm not worried about it now. So I have plenty of time for it later. Right now I need to get my hardware modding under control. Lol

 

I'm having the time of my life. Computers are fun again. So glad to be here, so happy to contribute in any way I can.

 

Thank you for your kind words. They mean a lot.

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NEW VERSION!


Get it here --->>>ZOMBi v0.37<<<


GAME IS CURRENTLY EARLY ACCESS ALPHA version. No ETA on Beta.

I will update this code below to the latest version when ever announced in a new comment so you don't have to go searching.
Just copy/paste from below OR download the zip below for the Source created in TidBit, Extended Basic Text & Classic99 Save format, HFE format for HxC emulated floppies or TiImageTool conversion.

How To Play:

About: This is meant to be a semi casual zombie survival game to escape a skyscraper. Play for score (session high score coming soon)

Combat: A melee attack is a swing attack that covers the space directly in front and behind the player. You get one attack per inventory item.
Joystick down = ranged attack. Coming soon, no effect at close range (need melee)

ZEDS: Will grab you and attack you. Hold a direction to escape, try hitting with melee, break away as fast as you can.

DODGE: You can attempt to dodge zeds by jumping past them (joystick button or J)

LOOTING: Will slow you down, jump past it to dodge the loot if you need to (for future versions when Zombies run)

Controls:
X=Quit, R=Reset, J and Controller Button = Jump, Joystick Left/Right moves left/right,
Joystick up = melee attack -

Notes: Melee attacks will destroy loot including hearts.
Don't mash the jump button, press and hold. It is possible to run over holes or run past loot without picking it up. Technically it's a COINC detection issue. I call it a feature. Looting while running? You're gonna miss a thing or two. Running over a hole? It's just a high risk jump. The crumbling floor on each side of the hole? Be careful of loose gravel, you can slip and fall.

Backstory: It's the zombie apocalypse. Hordes of the living dead are roaming the streets, you hear a helicopter and climb the tallest building level by crumbling level. You get to the roof and just as you make it to the end, the roof door is barred and you hear the helicopter motors fading in to the distance. Then you hear another sound. The sound of the dead creeping in and closer. They must have followed you. Now, it's time to get out. Escape to the ground floor street level. Good Luck.

V 0.37 changes:

Regained sprite by not using sprite for level exit.. Call hchar instead. COINC handled by screen position check.
Loot balancing with board progression. (game balancing)
More code optimizations:
v37 after OLD (load): 6992 program free. 6992 stack
v37 after RUN: 10606 stack free, 6000 program free.


To Do Next:

Keep optimizing.
Replace temp zombi health with per sprite health. right now they share 2hps and it gets reset to 2 at each death.
Create basic zombie AI and animate.
Session high score display between level progressions and at end of game.
Adjust range of ranged weapon to not hit at close range. Rely on melee for that.

Work on game balance (easy start extreme difficulty end)


KNOWN ISSUES:
There are no known bugs at time of upload.
Not all functionality or game mechanics have been developed as of this version.

To Do Long Term:
Title screen.
Sounds
Music.
zombie difficulty linked to board progression.
At least 2 more types of ever more difficult zombies.

Edited by Sinphaltimus
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SPOILER ALERT!

 

V0.39 work in progress sneak peaked and leaked. They MOVE!

 

post-47352-0-73153700-1476400606_thumb.gif

 

EDIT: Progress...
post-47352-0-15049900-1476554762_thumb.gif

 

 

 

Disclaimer: This is the first iteration of movement and it's not working as intended. They are supposed to change direction at walls AND holes so very buggy at the moment. But still.... :)

Edited by Sinphaltimus
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039 is not ready yet and it is going to take a lot of work.

 

Let me explain the hurdles I now face.

First, implementing moving zombies has crushed performance making it unplayable on real iron.

The only way to play it now is in overclocked emulation. Which means you need a decent computer.

There really is no way around it right now.

 

All is not lost.

 

What this means is, we go dark for a bit.

 

I have to recode everything necessary to be able to run it through XB256 compiler.

That is, I'm going to make it a bin file for (hopefully both) carts and FR99.

 

I believe that recompiling it will indeed solve all of the performance issues. And the only way for me to find out is to do it.

 

So I'm adjusting things like jumping etc...

 

You can load up v038 in classic99 then set cpu speed to either CPU overdrive or system maximum. Which ever is best for your computer. This will give you an idea of how the game should play when finished. And by finished, I really mean the next alpha version.

 

I'm almost finished with the core game mechanics which means beta is looming.... In beta I will add the title screen, instructions screen and credits screen as well as optimized and tweak.

 

Unfortunately, I won't really know how these changes will affect the game until I compile and run as bin so getting from here to that next step is going to take a while.

However; it's extremely exciting and going well. Performance has been an issue from early on and XB just can't handle it at the moment. So things are only going to get better. :)

 

 

Edited by Sinphaltimus
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I thought about removing the walls on the far left and right, and letting the player and zombies "travel through" the screen borders to the other side. But I see you have animation ready for the zombies, and you mentioned AI for the zombies, - so, all in all, you will have to compile sooner or later.

 

;)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've considered that as well. Those walls cause a huge overhead. I've not ruled it out yet. I need to see how bad it gets.

 

Namely, towards the end of the levels it will be possible to spawn 8 zombies. I'm going to test that sometime soon and see what happens.

 

Then I want to compile at that point and see how it behaves and performs. If it does great, then walls stay. If it sucks, then walls go away (punch a hole through).

Edited by Sinphaltimus
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Holy cow. OK.Where do I start?

 

Well, This is not an official release. The ZEDS are very buggy but so was all my code. The amount of bugs to squish resulted in a lot of rewriting of code.
Making the zombies mobile put way too much load on the system.

It became impossible to play test changes unless I ran the game in emulation only (classic99) and set it to cpu maximum.

 

That's when bug after bug presented themselves. killing them and enhancing the system, making the code better, ut even more stress on the system.

Eventually, it became impossible to play test the game in Extended Basic.

 

So what choice did I have? Abandon the project? Perhaps, but not yet. How would it run if I compiled it using H.W.'s compiler256D?

Well, that revealed a lot more issues with my code and a lot of clean up. And eventually I was able to compile version in AE5 format to play test.

This changed everything and I needed to rewrite a lot more code because speed and jump distances were dramatically altered with the turbo boost of asembly.

So I spent all day doing that.

And this here is an experimental interem unofficail leaked copy or the ae files for you to check out.

Like I said above, the zombies are pretty glitchy but it's playable.

Unzip in to your classic99/dsk2 folder, run the A/E cart, option 5 to load DSK2.ZOMBI39J-A

I hope it excites you for this project as much as it has excited me.

AE5 files: DSK2.zip

 

*EDIT: No Acceleration Required in Classic99.

Edited by Sinphaltimus
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Alrighty! Thanks to Senior Falcon (H.W.) for getting me past the points I don't yet know how to handle on my own.

Long story short, I was running a text formatting macro that ran through my code for a brief moment. This after hours of work (30 minutes since last save). The hours of work was my big push to get beyond a specific hurdle. In the last assembled version (unofficially released) soon to become v39, the zombies were glitched and bugged badly. Well, the macro caused some issue I couldn't find. So I couldn't test the hours of work I had done. Until now. And the Zeds are fixed.

Long Story not short.

Two issues I had with them. Issue one - they all turn around at the same time no matter who has a coincidence. Due to this, the behaviour of the other sprites became chaotic in the sense that they would get stuck at holes, some would travel over them, no rhyme or reason for it. And it was crushing performance.

 

So I stepped through all of the zombie code one by one and made adjustments and shifted code around. Then the macro issue happened that messed up portions of my code. I tried to fix that as best I could but obviously missed a couple of errors on one line.

So this morning I got past that hurdle thanks to Mr. Wilhelm. Over and over again.

So what I confirmed this morning is this....

I fixed the zombie issues.

 

 

Zeds now turn around independently. This means I figured out how to track and control each individual zombie. Which means I can now alter other attributes on a per zombie basis. I can finally give them all their own health (instead fo the shared health method I'm using now). it also means I can vary their speed ever so slightly to give them a bit of random movement. it also means I could have them randomly turn around in later levels and chase the player in even later levels.

It means, that 90% of my core mechanics are now complete and functioning. Or will be by the end of the week.

It also means you get to play the best version of ZOMBi to date right now.

However; you can't play it in Extended Basic anymore. It is just too slow and my movements are not calculated against this performance so jumping distances are way off. It's basically unplayable in (Extended) BASIC. So you have to execute the game (in emulation or on real iron) vie Editor/Assembler (AE5). OR load up the BIN file and play it via your FlashRom99.

This game is now in late access alpha, beta coming soon!

No details here. After I upload this I will get to editing the original post with all the details and known issues.

You'll also need to review post #1 for instructions if you don't know how to play.

Get the files here:
DSK2-ZOMB.zip

 

File Contents:
post-47352-0-74068400-1477302122_thumb.png

ZOMBI39-A = EA5 file created using editor assembly cartridge via classic99.

Use this to load option 5 DSKx.ZOMBI39-A

ZOMBI39-B = EA5 file created using editor assembly cartridge via classic99.

ZOMBI39-C = EA5 file created using editor assembly cartridge via classic99.
ZOMBI39-M = Extended BASIC saved merge file using classic99

ZOMBI39-O = Object file created using Compiler 256D

ZOMBI39-S = Source file created using Compiler 256D

ZOMBI39-X = Extended BASIC saved file using classic99

ZOMBIV039.bin = FlashRom99 ready bin file

zombtiV039.txt = Extended BASIC code in plain text created by TidBit

ZOMBtiV039_source.txt = my original plain text source code.

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I'm about to test the following.
Loot Distribution balance - don't be surprised of you don't see more than one zed per level to start.

Zed Health per zed. Going to up their hit points a little so 2 shots with a ranged to kill or 4 shots melee per zed. You can still jump past them to dodge.
Zed random speed per zed.


This is crazy..........

 

EDIT: Well, it's all working. Just need to adjust and test and adjust and test and adjust and test and adjust and test and adjust and test and adjust and test and.....

 

 

 

 

EDIT2: ...and shooting zeds is nerf'ed. Or was. I think I fixed it. too tired tho. Will test in the morning. No new version this evening...

 

edit3: HOLY COW.

Edited by Sinphaltimus
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