Here's a sneak preview of the very first Wacky Calendar for October 2021. As you can see, I need to finish the rest of it and color it by September 30. This was just a test to see if it could come out good. I was using a whole bunch of small print and drawings for this, so I wanted to see if I could make it look good when I scanned and colored it. After a multitude of tests to see what could be done with Photoshop, I think I have the magic formula here.
I'm half way done. I have an id
Trying to fix some rather mean vicious bugs in JatB. I think it has to do with the way I set up bankswitching. I tested it myself and I think I found out what the problem was and I hope I fixed it. What I did was change the level number for down the beanstalk checking from 4 to 5 like it should be. At least I think I fixed the bug where it sends you to a place off the vine if a bat hits you. I foumd a bug pertaining to the down movement of the castle, when you go down into a new room and are tou
I attempted to fix some bugs a playtester alerted me to. I don't know why a couple of them were happening, so I hope they'll go away on their own. I find I have a really hard time getting up after I fall asleep. So I wake up and think "I'm still sleepy, I'll just go back to sleep." And then I do. I did go back to sleep after writing that blog entry yesterday and I got up at about 7 p.m. I went to sleep at about 6 a.m. and woke up at 3 p.m.
I managed to somehow find my missing GameCub
I spent most of last night finishing the game. Testing it and retesting it to make sure it works and bankswitches when it's supposed to. Then when I had everything done, I changed the values so everything starts at the beginning. I put everything near the end so I didn't have to play through it all, which really helped when I had some pesky problems.
Then I tried to go to sleep but I couldn't. So I got up and made a little commercial for the game.
And after a long sess
So I figured if more people were interested in my Jack and the Beanstalk game than they were in my Burgers game that I should work on Jack some more. This time I think I discovered the problem I was having. And it has to do with the animation. Although there are some things I don't understand. But the gist of it is this: If Jack is walking and he hits the wall and the way the sprite is designed changes, then obviously Jack is going to get caught in the wall if the new frame of Jack is displaying
I have a question on NES games released late in the NES's life span. 1993-4. Why are they so freaking EXPENSIVE? I went on eBay and the only one I could afford that I didn't have already was Mickey's Safari In Letterland. The only game in decent condition came with Wheel of Fortune. It's a buffet of letters. Anyway, I was trying to get some more, but I guess I can't because I don't want to pay >$30 for something that's not worth >$30. Most of them are $100 or more. WHY? They were not price
Just got done playing the fixed version of HERTS for NES. I got my highest score on this game yet: 380. A perfect game is where you shoot everything and then you get 500. I am beginning though, to question the easiness of the game. The only stumbling block for me is getting past the first level where there's no nuggets (extra lives). Then it's mostly clear sailing through the rest of the game. Perhaps the quantity of chicken nuggets should be lowered. Right now it's a 4% chance that the enemy is
So I decided I should work on something I know how to do: NES. I decided to spruce up level 1 because all it was was white clouds on a blue background. After some time trying to find all the include files and putting stuff in the right order, I got this.
That's a little better. I'm now searching for a publisher, which isn't going so well. I really think it's good enough to be published, but I guess not because nobody seems to want to do it. And while I was working on this, I guess I g
I played Super Mario Bros. 2 last night with my Game Genie. It kept freezing at level 4. So I took it out and blew on the contacts, and then I played it until the very end. Originally I was not going to use any warps. When it froze the second time, I warped to world 4. And then to world 6. I misremembered it warping to world 7. I should go back and replay it just to experience level 5.
The Game Genie is a great device. Its only drawback is that you can only enter 3 codes. I used infi
I took a few hours to program the boulders in. Then I played it and something didn't seem right about it. It wasn't really all that much fun to me. So I thought of ways I could improve the game. I decided to make the giant's room be 7 screens high instead of just one. When you get to the top of one screen, you start at the bottom of the screen again. And repeat. Here are some of the features I programmed in.
The boulders don't start going until after you don't touch the ladder. Th
The grid and the characters don't really match up. If you line up three Hs, stacked one on top of the other, in between the grid lines, it doesn't quite match up. I should know, I toyed around with this for about an hour trying to do this. As a result, I just gave up and decided to have the giant's room look like this:
Which is mostly what I had in mind when I thought this up. But there's one problem: It's not much of a screen. I may have to add some more levels. But first I have to c
I thought before I begin work on the giant's room to take a little time to make sure that going down the beanstalk worked. Well, it wasn't. So I fixed it. It turned out to be a two-day affair, though. And instead of the beanstalk knocking you down 5 screens, it's only 4 now. This is because I didn't want to fiddle with the bank any more. I had to put in new code for going down because if a bat touches you, I wanted it to start 4 screens farther up since 4 screens down would be inappropriate. So
I figured "Why wait until later?" and began to merge what I had of Jack and the Beanstalk. This required a little adding to and movement of the code I had so the game still worked. I ran into a little snag, but I fixed it. The Odyssey 2 is a strange machine. You can't just jump from one bank to the next freely. Oh no, that would be too easy. Instead there are only certain banks you can jump to. Like, for instance, you can't jump from bank 2 to bank 1. You have to jump from bank 2 to bank 3 and t
After struggling with my code for 6 hours (I woke up at around 4 a.m. and quit at about 10) I went to fix some White Castle microwave burgers. And wouldn't you know it, I promptly had one of my choking fits where I couldn't keep water down. I don't know why but stuff apparently gets stuck in my throat, or I have no idea what goes on when that happens, but anyway, after a half-hour of forcing my finger down my throat, I found the problem.
So after that I went back to work on my game. It i
I went and designed and programmed the third floor of the Giant's castle. It will be very tight, but I think I will have enough room for four floors and key code. Here's something interesting I did. Here are rooms 13 and 14.
Since I had two exits on the right from room 12, I figured "Why not do that thing I did from the beanstalk where you need to go back a screen before continuing?" So that's what I did. I think I'll make the fourth floor's color be "light grey", whatever that means.
Well, it took a looong time, but I finally found my Atari 800XL. I only know it's an Atari 800XL because it says "Atari 800XL" on it. Someone had put it in a huge cardboard box at the bottom of the mailing supplies I use to mail stuff out in the garage. I found the games I have for it.
Asteroids
Defender
Dig Dug
Joust
Pole Position
Space Invaders
Super Breakout
Which, while an all-star lineup of arcade games, leaves me wanting something mo
So after about 3 weeks, I went back and worked on Save the Puppies. Today's task was to attempt to make a game over screen with a little tune. Here is the end result:
I still have lots of room left to still keep it at 32k. Since everything else is completed, I can use the extra room to store level designs, as well as extra tarantula behavior.
I also made it so that if you press Start at the game over screen, you'll go straight to a new game. I never did see my reasoning of going
So the internet quit working yesterday. I decided to go to sleep at about 1 p.m. since it's no fun being without the internet. I woke up at 4 a.m. and the internet came back an hour later. I got Klax and a 6-button Genesis controller in the mail while I was asleep. It's hard to tell the Klax designs apart on a Game Boy. After testing my 6-button Genesis controller (I can now do God Mode in 32X Doom.) I went to work on beginning the boss in HERTS3 for Game Gear.
I should try Klax on my
It's not even half way through morning and I've spent about 90 minutes today trying to beautify my Game Gear game. For it being a color portable, it sure doesn't have that many games. Game Boy has the better library IMHO, even though it's in black and white. Anyway, I made it so when I turn the screen off it is black instead of a reddish purple. I also made the nachos and pepperoni slices behave like homing missiles, following you and moving left at the same time. The onion rings don't do this,
Let's say you are tired of video games. Then what is a great way to pass the time? Why, making and solving crosswords of course. My grandma got me started and hooked on them. After a few, I decided to try to make some. Not only did I get hooked on solving them, I also got hooked on making them. I like the odd grid shapes of the TV Guide crosswords from their inception to around 1990 when they stopped being so odd and began to "normalize". I began to make weird grid designs, odd placement of blac
Most of today was spent sleeping. I went to sleep at around 7 a.m. Didn't get up until at least 8 p.m. Then I worked a little bit on Jack and the Beanstalk, making the code simpler. The only thing I added were stairs on the second floor of the castle, which are to lead to the third floor. I think the total number of rooms I'll have in the castle is 56.
I first thought the way the code to hide the key would work would be to get a random number to get a room number and put it in there.
I haven't been sleeping much. I hate sleep. It's so boring laying there waiting for at least a half-hour. My mind keeps thinking of stuff I'd like to do and rather be doing. I only got 6 hours of sleep because of this. I went to work on Jack and the Beanstalk. I added in the stairs. All you have to do to use them is touch them.
For example, touching these stairs:
will get Jack to the second floor:
If Jack touches these stairs, he'll go back to the first floor.
Jac
Here is Jack in room 1 of the castle.
I decided to make the castle like this so I can place stuff freely in it and if it touches the wall, Jack can still grab it. Jack can't move yet, but I designed a walking Jack (as opposed to a climbing Jack) Of course making the grid like this requires more bytes (just my luck) so I am probably going to have to scale back the number of rooms per floor. I'm aiming for 15 rooms. So that means there will probably be 8 floors (a big castle!) I snuck a
One of the things I like to do is create little poems and put them to music. I have two collections of musical poetry. Each song is 28 seconds long. I don't know why I chose 28 seconds isntead of 30, but oh well. Each CD has 66 songs on it. I'm working on #3. I'm calling the albums "Golf Balls," "Golf Balls 2," and now "Golf Balls 3." GB3 will be the first collection to have a little book with all the lyrics in it. Here is a sample of what the poetry is. This one is called "The Ant Show".
So I was playing version 66 of Uncle Hairy's Nosehair when I noticed when I finished a game and the music was playing, the b&w colors changed once randomly and then never again. I set out to find a reason why. I ultimately found that I was uisng ora #15, which made the colors be the brightest. And when you only use one set of colors, it doesn't change because grayscale is one set of colors compared to the rest of the colors.
Normally this would be a quick fix, but there was an ex
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