Well, we finally got the new ac/furnace installed yesterday. Most of my waking hours were spent cooped up in my room with the dog working on the computer and listening to the jazz station on TV. The jazz station has its flaws, for example, I keep noticing songs that seem that they just played the day before. But oh well. They arrived at 8am and after working all day, left at about 5pm. As a result, I don't know how to work the thing. I thought turning it to heat or cold and turning a knob (like
So I'm at the 50% mark on Frank the Fruit Fly. I started this project in July of 2018, so it only took me a year and a half to get to this point. Yesterday I worked on the level 5 intro. The plan is to have 8 levels total. Level 5 will take place in the city. Which city? A big one. I guess any city you want. Your typical metropolis with alleys and skyscrapers. It will be at night so there will be less people around that want to try to squish you. I worked to make sure it went from level 4 to her
I was working on Frank the Fruit Fly making sure the passwords worked right. I tried level 3. I got four screens in when it started acting weird:
So I went through the code and determined that the cause was code placement. I tried for about an hour trying to move code and stuff. I then remembered about the .orgfill statement. Perhaps that could help. So I tried putting that in the code in various spots. It worked. It also made my code 40kb larger. When I get all done adding levels, I
Finally tried Frank the Fruit Fly with sound. Discovered that the game cuts off the level intro ditty. Must have been because I got rid of a little bit of code during it. So since the two variables that control it were maxed out at 255, I decided to speed up the song a little. I don't think it's too noticeable. I was working on trying to get the frog jumping on the oasis screen when I discovered the music thing, and it sidetracked me for a little bit.
A large part of time was spent t
Bored out of my mind, I started reading one of my favorite books again. "Alphabet Avenue" by Dave Morice dives head first into the art of wordplay. A 'pangram' is a sentence or quote using all 26 letters of the alphabet. Here is an excerpt of the book:
"Peter Newby composed a twenty-six letter takeoff of 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.': QWYK GLAZ'D VOX JUMPS FERN BITCH." Glaz'd is a synonym for 'brown', Vox means 'fox', and 'fern' is defined in its former adjectival se
I found a lovely bug pertaining to the passcode system of Quest of the Cranberry.
What's that number to the left of the five? You tell me. Normally, the player would only see this bug if he were just randomly inputting numbers for entering a passcode in the hopes one would find one that works. But apart from that, I did make the beginning of level 3 okay.
I am wondering whether to drag Craig lower while he's swimming (like in Super Mario Bros.) and the player would have to
Last time we left Frank the Fruit Fly, he was at the fireplace getting ready to enter the chimney. Spent a long time yesterday with this, but here (finally) is a picture of inside the chimney.
There is a bigger fly trapped in the chimney. All he does is just fly in a square pattern. This causes Frank to fly in a zig zag pattern so as not to touch the big fly. About half of the time was trying to make Frank stay inside the borders, and the other half was spent making the big fly move t
A birthday present from myself came in the mail today. I got Sssnake for the Sssupervision (Sssorry.) It was sssealed. Ssso I opened it. I felt bad about opening a sssealed game that had been that way for 30+ years. But video games are meant to be played. And apparently they're cheaper if they haven't been opened. It sssaid "Supervision" instead of "Travellmate". I guess Watara had the possibility of changing the opening to whatever they felt like. It's totally different from the game "Sssnake"
Making this in 7800 BASIC should not take TWO HOURS.
I am going to add fancy title screen music. (Well, as fancy as you can get with TIA.) And then what, I don't know.
I started out with a fancy actual pineapple. But color #1 did not want to show up. And then I thought "OK, this is ugly. I'd be better off drawing a pineapple." So I did. Color #1 in the palette still wasn't showing up. So I did a work around. I made color 1 insignificant and used the other colors. And I was also h
Between getting ready to ship boxes of Trimerous out (there are still a few left, btw), I have been working on a new Channel F game. Perhaps a game of "Trimerous 2" is in the making? Anyway, it's a fly swatting game called Flies. Flies to swat at, bombs to avoid, great fun for all. Right now I have a title screen and the beginning of an in game thing working.
The lovely title screen. What I WANTED to have happen was have a pretty song play here and then pause the song to animate the f
I hated the way the passwords in Frank the Fruit Fly were kind of "guessable." So I changed it. If you wanted 99% health, the first and third letters were "k". But now it isn't like that. It now varies with each level password, making for a more random look if one were to look at the 99% health codes list. Granted, they're still K's, but they're now in different places, and hey, who is going to begin each level with 99% health, anyway?
I could have gone the route I did for Quest of t
The smoke issue at my house is a little better today. I went for a walk and I could see little ashes falling from the sky. I worked for an hour on Castle of Doom. While I was playing it, I found an issue with room 52. So I fixed it. I also changed room 40 because I deemed it too hard and almost downright impossible. Some of the time was spent making a new room 54. I don't know whether I should change the name of the game because it's quite similar to "Room of Doom" by Commavid. (not to mention t
Today I'm in the mood for the 64 bits of powa. I worked on Zyx Game Collection #1 even though it has practically no chance of getting released ever. I wonder if Songbird would like to? Just to make sure my Jaguar worked, I plugged it in, plugged the cord to my TV, and pressed the button. The power light didn't light up. So I tried again. Nothing. I was beginning to think my Jaguar had died after each attempt. I unplugged it, made sure the power strip was plugged in, made sure it was plugged in f
I wanted to make the Yeti in "Quest of the Cranberry" faster. This presented a problem. Since the yeti was moving two pixels left instead of one, it left green splotches of "residue" since I had only one pixel worth of border. So I changed the Yeti. It's now a grape. It could be an unripened cherry tomato, but it is a grape. Grapes are funnier.
I've been having trouble with my mouse lately. It is hard to left-click stuff. I think I need a new mouse. I'm going to the doctor tomorrow fo
So I had ants keep coming in my bathroom. Perhaps a couple every time I went in. So I put two Terro traps in there and went to sleep. When I woke up about 12 hours later, there were about 200 or so ants, with an additional at least 50 dead in the traps themselves. This is crazy. Since I wanted to be able to use my bathroom and not the other one, I went to work killing all them, and I put the ant-covered traps outside. It must have taken me 20 minutes to make sure all the ants I could see were de
So I'm back to work on Quest of the Cranberry, my Channel F game. I know, I hop around from various project to various project. Most of my projects seem to be about anthropomorphic food. I wonder if that means I'm subconsciously hungry all the time or what. Or it's just that I find that funny. Anyway, I added a password system to the game, something I said I'd do last but I ended up doing it now because I wanted to and was bored. So once you get past the screen with the heart, a blue number will
Just a heads up. If you want to contact me via e-mail, I won't be able to view it until at least Monday. Right now I'm on the spare computer in the den instead of typing on mine in my room because the fan gave out and it needs to be replaced. Unfortunately, this means not only will I not be able to respond to any e-mails, I also can't work on any of my projects until I get my computer back. I can still go on the internet and stuff, but I'd just prefer not to mess with the settings.
S
So I attempted to make a Game Boy game larger than 32k. I think I succeeded with a start. I put some data in bank 3 and read it from bank 0. Which is a huge start. I've made a 64k ROM. So we'll see where this goes. My interest in the Bert game has been lessening. I found a way to test it on a real Atari 2600, though.
I put the font in bank 3 as well, and read it in bank 0. This is just a test screenshot. I plan on adding a burger in the background. Getting the burger moving was hard,
I made a website for the 7800 game I'm working on called "pineapple." You can find it here. It has instructions and a ROM to try out. It's really lovely. I am super sleepy. I tried to change my life around so I'm up during the day. I went to sleep at 2 p.m. and woke up at 7 a.m. I purposely did that so I would wake up at a sane time. But since I apparently need at least 12 hours of sleep each night, this means I'll probably go to sleep at about 6 p.m. or so.
This blog entry begins in the unlikely year of 1862. When I get bored, I sometimes work on personal projects, like music CDs. In 1862, the epic poem "Goblin Market" was published. It was brought to my attention in an old issue of Playboy or something that my grandparents had. It was dated before I was born. I don't know why they had it. A few years after reading about it, I found the old poem online. Man it's long. So began the task I challenged myself of putting it to music. Like almost all my
I was working on Frank the Fruit Fly again today. I wanted to make it so when Frank went between two cacti. The one in yesterday's picture. Since there's three, I needed to make a way for the game to know which duo of cacti Frank went between and which he hasn't. The answer involved making him go between the right set first and then the left set, thus unlocking the screen so he can continue. But that wasn't all. I had a heck of a time trying to make it so Frank couldn't fly into a cactus from ab
Well, whaddya know? As it turns out, my perfectionism got in the way of my vacation. I had to make the game absolutely perfect before I began my break. But now everything is perfect since I worked on it some more and made it perfect. I even tested it on my Atari 2600 to make sure it was perfect. I even got rid of a rather nasty bug that put the scanline at 261 for one frame at the end of the game after the death sequence played. This made the game jump a little on my real TV. But I fixed it.
Mom thinks the dog is dying. We had to take mom to the doctor's office after her hospital stay. When we got back, we had food and boy did the dog want it. I don't know why mom can't see the dog jumping around and playing and yet she's all "She's not OK, she's dying!" The dog is walking around without trouble. She wants to eat food. The dog is fine. Mom loves that dog, and it would be sad for all of us if she died, but she isn't any time soon. There's something wrong with Mom's brain and none of
So I woke up to discover that there were ants crawling all over the kitchen counter. Barf. Right now it's a quarter past 8 p.m. and I'm sleepy. I just finished discovering I have no idea how to return a random value in Channel F programming. So I spent a few hours making this:
All the fly does is flap his wings and move diagonally around and if he touches a border reverses course. And I spent two hours on it. I'm going for a Mario-Paint fly swatting type game. I was going to do this f
So I put a web page up about the music I mentioned in yesterday's blog. I mentioned my mouse broke. So I went to Wal-Mart to get a new mouse. I had no idea there was such a thing as a fancy gaming mouse. I was looking at those, which cost anywhere between $40-$80 before I found the regular mouses (mice?). I pondered whether I should get one with a cord or without. The one with a cord, the cord was only two foot long, which I feared would be too short. So I went with the wireless mouse. It came w
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