Issue 1 of the thing I was making was done early, so I also decided to post it early. I made a webpage for the newsletter-type thing I made and you can find it right here: Eli Ate My Kidney Beans
I doubt many people will read it, but it was fun to make and I'll go ahead and make a second issue. It will be the back-to-school issue, so I want to finish it by the end of August. I am trying to think of a game idea based on the words "Eli Ate My Kidney Beans" but I can't think of anything.
Been working on lots of stuff. First I worked on Golf for the channel f. e5frog alerted me to a few problems he was having. I made it so hitting the ball into a tree costs you a penalty stroke. I have also been working on Frank the Fruit Fly, getting the dragonfly to appear in the game.
Pokemon Mini sprites can be a maximum size of 16x16 pixels. Since the two dragonfly sprites when put together were 32x17, I had to do more code to make sure it wouldn't bounce up and down. I had to pu
I have been so busy working on Golf for the Channel F that I decided for a change of pace to work on something else. I decided for a challenge, to make the numbers in the password letters, so it resembles an actual passWORD (instead of passnumber). The part I had forgotten was before I actually used to write the word on level 2's intro screen instead of making it the entered entry. Which I guess doesn't make much sense. How would you know it if you got to level 2 and didn't know it before? I'm s
And nothing really seems to be going on with it lately. It would have been nice to see some sort of new game to celebrate the 20th anniversary, but it looks like it's not going to happen. I brought out my Dreamcast and hooked it up. It still works. Which is good because I went and ordered some Dreamcast games off eBay. They are all games I previously had but sold because I got uninterested in the Dreamcast. But I kept the system and 50+ games, which is good because I am interested in it again.
...especially when you're programming it in an air conditioned house. So I was working on Golf for the Channel F again. I was working all night from about 8pm to now. It's almost 1:30am here. I added two holes to the game. But when I started at the beginning, I broke hole 11 somehow. So most of my time tonight was spent trying to fix it. I finally did. I don't know how I did, either. So all that's needed to be done is add 5 more holes. It's getting really hard, since the code is 5,471 lines, not
Insects are everywhere. I saw an ant in my room. It was horrible. They've been on the kitchen counter for a while now, but not in my room. I went to work on Frank the Fruit Fly last night. I was having trouble with it. Whenever I died, there was this pixel up at the top of the title screen. I kept trying different things to get rid of it, nothing was helping. Until I realized that that pixel wasn't just a bug pixel, it was the pixel from the bottom of the snowflake. I had set the snowflake's y p
This is Steve the kidney bean.
I drew him for a mascot of the new newsletter thingy I'm working on called "Eli Ate My Kidney Beans." When I was a kid way back in 1995, I made these little newsletters for my friends. I still have most of them in a book form. But a lot of stuff has changed since then and I now have the internet so I can reach everyone around the world with my creations.
Anyway, I wasn't sure he'd come out this well when I scanned the paper I drew him on. But
Worked on Frank the Fruit Fly some more. Sometimes when I went to the password screen, it was kind of messed up. Other times it worked perfectly. So I wanted a wonderful working password screen. So I thought I'd take a second stab at redesigning it. This is what I got. Since the redesign, it has been working fine. But that doesn't mean it will always. Pokemon Mini game programming problems seem to pop up and disappear whenever they feel like it.
One thing I've also noticed is that the
I'm making a new project. A new newsletter-type thing. It will have pages of useless information and trivia in it. In case you've ever read an Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, kind of like that, only crazier and in newsletter form. Anyway, I decided to make a page dedicated to the wumpus. Why? Because it sounds funny. But there's just one problem: I don't have a TI-99. So I went to Wikipedia to research the page. What I want from TI-99ers is if you could read the page and verify the information on
I was poking around my computer, finding stuff that I forgot about, when I ran across my old Ants game for the 2600. No, not the very old game, the more recent one which was a port of the Jaguar game I was working on. So I continued where I left off and added some more stuff. I have 952 bytes left until I run out of room for 4k and then have to make it 8k.
I don't know what to add or change, though. I put a whole bunch of sound effects in the game yesterday, working while it sounded
So I decided to play my game.com. It had been right next to my bed for months, so when I got it, it was covered with dust and stuff. So after dusting it off and plugging it in, I decided to play Indy 500. Whenever I hit a curve, my car would automatically hit the wall and spin around, no matter where I was on the track. Also, the car ahead of me seemed to always block me, wherever I was. So I gave up and played Sonic Jam. I actually beat Stage 1 of Sonic 2! I am so proud of myself. So then after
One of the things that bothered me was that the ball flickered when it hit obstacle #2 or 3 when it was a tree. Yesterday I tried to fix the problem but was unsuccessful. Today, though, I think I did it. The problem was the ball wasn't appearing when the power meter was reducing, thus causing the flicker. (I don't know why it wasn't happening to obstacle #1, though.) So now it does the same thing when all three obstacles are hit when they are trees.
I made the third obstacle be able
Friday night I started working on making three obstacles in the game for the 10th hole. It kept making weird stuff happen, so I had to give up. Saturday afternoon I started up again. I kept working even though the weird stuff kept happening. I kept working on it all night starting at about 10 p.m. At 3 a.m. I finally made it happen. Then I went to sleep and woke up at 2:00p.m. and then my back teeth started hurting.
Yes, you can go between the two trees, but you will waste your time t
I thought something wasn't working right when I played Frank the Fruit Fly on real hardware. As it turns out, something wasn't. I thought in theory you made a gray color by alternating between black and white. While it does work, it produces a sort of unwanted, annoying "shimmering" effect if you do it to large areas. The solution?
Checkerboard the larger areas instead of make them all white then all black. So I went to work changing all the screens in the game that had gray in them
Today I worked on Golf a lot. While I was working, I ran into all sorts of problems, but I think I sorted them all out now. It leaves me wondering whether I'm trying to do too much stuff. Anyway, one of the things I did today was put clothes on the guy.
With the blue pants and blue water it looks like he's swimming in the water. Which is kind of amusing. Looking at the picture, I can simplify this further by just putting the blue golf club with the blue pants. In case I need to becaus
So with renewed interest in my Golf game I decided to work on it some more. One of the things I wanted to do, and did, was made the power meter faster. One of the things I plan to do is add an ending tune to the game. I have to compose one first. People want 18 holes, but I don't really have any more ideas for holes, so if I do make 18 holes, I'd need help with course designing.
I updated the Golf site with version 42 and also posted it in the game's AtariAge thread. Another thing I
Last night I had an idea for a new screen in my Fruit Fly game. So there's this giant ice wall and Frank can't get past it. Luckily for him, there's this fire-breathing dragonfly coming along. Using the fire coming out of him, the dragonfly can melt the ice blocks so Frank can get past it. Just make sure Frank doesn't get burned though. So dragonflies are just like dragons and can emit fire. They just don'r choose to because the whole earth would have been burned a long time ago.
So
Yesterday I decided to make the music for Frank the Fruit Fly longer so it doesn't start getting on your nerves when you play it. Level 1's music was ridiculously short, so I just extended it to about 25 seconds until it loops again. Level 2's music is now about 30 seconds. I could make them longer, but it is really very hard to compose music when you have just one audio channel to work with.
I also worked on the inside of the igloo and made it so you can fly over the exit instead of
I can't draw one. This is the closest I could come to a shark sprite with 8x8 pixels. I'm hoping someone else can do better than this.
But I think I got the code for the shark swimming around randomly working. The plan is to have him not be susceptible to torpedoes so you have to dodge him. I don't know though, since it's kind of hard to do. And changing the image that goes in is easy, so I just need a .png image. The most colors I can use in a sprite is 3. Anyway, that's what I've be
So I got a banner acting like a sprite. This let me make a big ol' giant octopus.
The giant octopus chases you around the screen. Although it is kind of easy right now to kill the thing. Perhaps I should make the giant octopus faster. I think I will.
I have yet to work on the shark, I have spent about an hour or so on this, and the rest of my time was spent working on something else. I woke up at about midnight or so. But that doesn't guarantee me being awake at noon, sinc
So I thought that the animation of Frank flapping his wings could be better. So I set out to make it better. Instead of 2 frames, it is now four, but one of the frames is used twice. Frank now looks like this:
I used a gif maker that apparently doesn't like to make images bigger. The original images are 8x9 and look much better, but Frank was hard to see so I made it bigger. Frank does not look this blurry in the game. I was asleep most of yesterday. And I'm still sleepy.
So nex
I used to have a website where I uploaded comics via an online ftp server. For some reason, last month it quit displaying the comics I uploaded. So I quit drawing them. But I got in the mood for drawing some more comics, but I have nowhere to post them, except for here. I do my comics in groups of 3. Since a sheet of paper is 8.5 x 11 inches. 3 comics fit perfectly on this page. Then I scan the page, enter Photoshop, resize the comics (I don't know why scanners like to make extra-large sized
So I took a look and tested what I had of level 2 before the igloo part. I needed to fix a few things. It should be running okay now. I also added some snow on the igloo screen (not the inside of the igloo, that would be crazy.) The way I think it is is if the largest Pokemon Mini ROM can be 512k, and if bankswitching is needed after 64k, then that must mean you can have 8 64k banks in a code. I've taken to sleeping on the couch at about 9 a.m. and not getting up until about 5 p.m. Today I w
Well, it took all night but I finally got a working version of Frank the Fruit Fly that is bigger than 64k. Not very much though, it's 67k. But a couple of people on the Pokemon Mini Discord helped me with it. So now what I'm going to do is keep working on it. I suspect I am going to have to move the code for level 1 to the 64k mark eventually since I would like to make an adventure with many different scenarios, screens, and levels. But that's not soon. When I get done with the second level,
I had an idea for a screen for Frank the Fruit Fly. I decided to have yet another wall block his path. This time, Frank needs to go into an igloo where the switch to remove the wall is located and press it so he can move forward. This took about a couple hours to do. Most of the work was making sure the coordinates for Frank's interactions were correct (or close). Odd screens though happened. Like in the igloo for one: Notice the upper right hand side is screwed up. I tried my best to make it l
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