I've been working on Aaron the Aardvark on Jaguar after finding out that my Channel F game freezes after you die 8 times. Yesterday had me putting in new backgrounds for the game designed by Clint Thompson. It makes me wish I had a skunkboard, but if I look on eBay, they're all about $400 or so. My game is about 1.33MB. I learned yesterday from him that the limit is 1.9MB. I guess all these fancy images are big in size. My ultimate goal is to have the game in the AA Store so I can play the gam
Here is a picture of my latest Channel F project after I decided that Quest of the Cranberry was too ambitious for the Channel F. I decided to do something simpler, so I'm going for simpler things, like this. It's kind of like Fast Food, but the giant face's mouth closes if fire is pressed, otherwise it's open. The idea being to eat the candy and avoid the rhubarb. I'll have two items on screen at once. The hardest part will be randomly choosing either a rhubarb or candy piece. In other news,
After two attempts taking a few hours, I've decided if it's going to be a difficult piece of poop and not obey my commands and instead reset itself, then I have no choice but to give up on the cranberry project and do something a bit less complicated. Anyone have any ideas? Apparently I can't do what I want, and apparently it goes off in a different direction and does something entirely different THAN WHAT I TELL IT TO DO. It just angers me! Oh well, I guess it's just back to composing my song
I decided to put some rain in the Cranberry game. I got it moving good, but a lot of time was spent trying to get the left over stuff gone when the raindrop reset. I finally decided that my cool slanted raindrop I designed was not going to work, so I reduced it to a line. I wanted to put something in the game besides the blueberry to make the game harder. I think I finally succeeded with that. Each time I tried to cross the rain screen, about 10% of my health came off trying to dodge the rain. A
I went to work again on the game. It took a long time to do what I wanted. I think the problem is the game kept crashing when I exited the first screen. I think it was due to me having too much code in the game. I am beginning to think that such a game might not be possible on the poor Channel F. I deleted some unneccessary code from the game. I got what I wanted, but the cranberry was moving at different speeds on different screens. Disgruntled, I went to sleep. I woke up the next morning (Ye
I think I figured out how to make 4k games on my own. I went to the VES wiki and took a look at some of the disassemblies of commercially released games. I noticed something. A 2k game did not go above the address A0fff, while the bigger ones did. I went back and inspected my own code. I noticed the signature:
org $ff0signature: .byte ".chris read 2018"
I thought the ff0 was A0ff0. So I thought to myself, "Well, what if I changed that org statement?" So a few attempts later, I got a
So yesterday I worked on the Cranberry game some more. I made the changes I talked about in yesterday's blog. I made it so there's a screen type. And I made it so the screen type is the thing based on deciding what goes where instead of the screen number. This will save a lot of space, so instead of having two long things of code to decide what to show when, I'll only have one. I was still bored, so I decided to put in the health monitor. I fiddled around with different ways to do this, includ
So I worked and worked for hours. I finally got it so not only does the blueberry chase you around, but it does so only on a specific screen. You start on screen 1 and then move right, just like in Pitfall (although in this game you can't move left at the starting screen.) Screen 2 has the blueberry and screen 3 doesn't. Surprisingly, having the blueberry chase Craig was the easy part. What turned out to be extremely hard and basically most of my programming was moving from screen to screen.
The internet was mostly out yesterday. This led me to more time programming. I didn't go to sleep until 2pm, because I was having "fun" programming. I started with the Channel F because it had been a while since I last programmed it. I want to make an adventure game, a lot like My History Teacher Ate Lemons, only for the Channel F. A hard task. I had problems from the start. The guy I made looked crappy when he was moving. I even had him animated, but I had to scrap it because it looked atrociou
I beat Stove Canyon. It took about 12 million tries though. The dumb boss doesn't throw the rocks needed to defeat him enough. Not only that, he destroys the platform you're standing on piece by piece. And if that isn't enough, there's lots of wide jumps. About half the time was spent dying because I didn't jump far enough. And then there were the times that I just gave up and jumped into the lava because the dumb boss didn't give me enough rocks to defeat him in time. All this difficulty has
I have noticed that there are only a few cable channels I can record now. Forget networks. I am so sick of greed I could vomit. Why would anyone care if I record something off TV? Yeah, like I'm gonna sell it. Do people actually do that? Is that why they stopped letting you record network TV channels? No. It's greed. Just the very thought of someone recording something for their own private use makes them fearful that they'll lose a penny even though they won't. It's greed, folks, and it has des
Last night I worked on Mr. Stick for Game Boy. I fixed the eyes so they're a lot better now. I also added in the game logic for the vegetable or candy getting. It took a whole lot of time, maybe a couple hours, to put in that background. I decided to, but it was persistent in not letting me. Finally, some really weird code later I had the background in. I can't explain what I did, though, or why it works.
I have a little story for the game. Mr. Stick decides to trade his cow for something be
So I've decided on my next Game Boy game to work on. I needed a simple idea that hasn't been done on the Game Boy yet. MidSpace is (sort of) based on Tempest. My new game I'll be working on, The Adventures of Mr. Stick, will be (sort of) based on the classic Atari 2600 game Fast Food. In this game, Mr. Stick needs to dodge the icky vegetables and get the yummy candy. One thing will be changed, though: Mr. Stick NEEDS to get the candy, or he'll lose a life. I'll explain why.
The game I'm plan
I am announcing that I will have 9 copies of my Game Boy game I made caled MidSpace on sale next month. The game will come with a nice label, and a custom box from customgamecases.com, and perhaps a manual. The game will be $19. Let me know if you're interested in one. I will let you know when I get the games and can ship them. It will take a while because they have to come from Europe. And also, next month, I will mail out the 9 copies of the Channel F games once everyone has paid for them.
Every day, I devote about an hour of composing and putting into MIDI format my songs. The first track is a little over 11 minutes long now since I started a week ago. I realized that in order to listen to these on CD, I need to convert them to MP3. Googling found a whole bunch of MIDI to MP3 converters. I think when the time comes, I'll go with the one here: https://www.onlineconverter.com/midi-to-mp3 So I read the terms of service. How can anyone get injured using a MIDI to MP3 converter? I gue
That's how long it took me to write my second novel. Granted, I wasn't working on it all the time and only did it in spurts of inspiration. But last night I woke up at about midnight after only four hours of being asleep. I went to sleep at 8pm last night. I got to thinking about it for some unknown reason and said to myself, "I'm going to finish this." I had about 23 pages left before I could call it finished. But I got to 112 pages, my desired length, only about 300 words short of 20,000.19,
I went back to work on making My History Teacher Ate Lemons again. I slept a whole bunch yesterday, but I'm still sleepy right now at almost 2pm. I'm right back where I left off on this game. Last time I left Fred he was stuck in the snow level. Well, I'm going to add a few more screens to this and then call level 2 done. Then I can work on level 3: a desert.
The plan was to devote 15k or so to each level. Right now the game is 30k. So I'll probably make it be 16k for each level. That would
Today I woke up and after a few hours of being awake, I decided to continue work on Aaron the Aardvark, my game for the Atari Jaguar. Last time I quit because it was being hard to work on and with. Today I decided I am going to work on this and not stop until it was working correctly. This proved to be a tough task, because it kept on being uncooperative. But I finally got it the way I wanted it to be for now. A lot of things came into consideration. Like for example, losing a life after the l
Call me crazy but I've made the front cover for my album I've made. I found a copy of a CD I had made in 2009 (Hard to believe that was NINE years ago!) It is called "Pretty Pretzels" by a fictional band I made up called "No" (A take on "Yes"). I decided to have No make a comeback album, and this is the one I'm working on. The difference is, all the songs on the 2009 CD are improv pieces on my keyboard, while the one I've just begun are actual pieces with music that anyone can play over and over
Well, not exactly. Inspired by making MIDIs of other people's long songs, I decided to compose a long song myself. One that's really easy to play and follow along to. So I sat at my piano plunking out notes. Notes, that when played together (chords) sound good or interesting, at least to me. I finished my long MIDI I made of "The Diamond Sea". I sat down and said to myself that I was going to finish all 10 minutes I had left whether my eye hurt or not (it did.) Anyway, you can follow along as
Today I finally figured out how to make it so the platforms in the Odyssey 2 game I'm working on don't scroll automatically. It involved adding code from the Intv version of Upmonsters to this game, something which I tried to do before but it failed. This time it worked, however. I've used 1,585 bytes now, so it didn't take much additional code to do it. But since I programmed the banana in mind that I would never get it to stop scrolling upwards though, it now has to keep falling instead of s
I went back to the Pit code to see if I could get the guy's mouth back on. It took an hour reshifting code, but I finally got it working again. I also deleted the code for the sounds that wasn't being used. I've used 1,573 out of a possible 2,048 bytes so far, so I have some room to add stuff, but I don't know what to add. I'm pretty wary about changing what I have a lot, as that may break the game again.
I woke up at about 2:30pm. I need to go to the post office sometime this week, so I gue
Yesterday I worked on some artwork for the Midspace label. Today I realized that the artwork does not match the in-game rocket. So I changed the rocket in the game. Last night I had a little nap and was asleep from 7-10pm. Then I went back to sleep at about 7am and was asleep until about 1:30pm. So I think the MidSpace game is completed now, unless of course, I fnd another bug. I'm amazed I was able to fit all the stuff I wanted into just 32k. I always have this fear when releasing a game that a
Some kind person on the Game Boy programming forum I go to was kind enough to help me out on my game. He debugged it and found what I think was the problem. I changed one line (yes, one) of code, and played it for 15 minutes. The problem did not pop up. Went to sleep, woke up about a few hours ago (12:45pm. I was so sleepy. I couldn't get to sleep until about 1am last night.) and tested it out again on real hardware for a few minutes. Still no problem. Unless someone reports a bug, I think I'm
Okay, so MIDIs are a way obsolete file type, but I have a collection of them on the internet. Long time readers of this blog know my fascination with long songs. So this collection has a bunch of long songs in MIDI form. You name a long song, it's probably here. If not, then get to work and I'll add it. Pink Floyd, Rush, ELP, and Dream Theater are just a few of the prog bands I have long MIDIs of. Of course, I had to make a few Dream Theater ones (I did NOT make the Octavarium one, though. It is
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