Mountain King

Update 64 Beta-The game is finished barring any major bugs that might pop up. 1. Refixed the eating bug while in the Zazzle Clearing, apparently I broke it again. 2. Fixed the bug where occasionally you would remained trapped on the board after clearing all the enemies. 3. Fixed the bug where the red tree would not appear right away. 4. The tree acts more erratic now. 5. The blood splat is timed better so it will not stop in mid air. 6. Myrmica remains will splat on the playfield as well as the ground. 7. Fixed a bug where Mymica remains did not hurt you. Now they do. Avoid touching them. 8. Revamped the scoring. Pick up a cloud fruit 10 points Shoot a cloud fruit with the Zazzle Fly 30 points Find a lair trigger 50 points Enter a lair 50 points Ant, Wasp or Crab 100 points Invicta Minors 1000 points Invicta Prime 5000 points 9. Added Sound to the Wasp and Crab. Also added sound when you pick up a cloud fruit. 10. Changed the Ending Animation slightly 11. Opening Animation Changes if you beat the game. This is pretty much it. Can anyone test it out on a real Atari? My Harmony cart died just as I was going to test this version. GIZZLEWAPdpc64beta.bas.bin

Sweet! Nice review.

Update 63 1. Fixed a bug where the life bar would appear in the opening animation. 2. Changed the sound when the Ant,crab or wasp dies from a "beep" to a "splat" 3. Added a death animation to the ant,crab and wasp. They will "splat" and may fall to the ground and make a puddle of blood. (note: it's not recommended to touch Myrmica remains in any form. They are known to be toxic.) 4. Changed the Invicta Minor AI slightly. They teleport away when hit. The blood might have made this game controversial in 1985. Not so know. GIZZLEWAPdpc63.bas.bin

Update 62, this ones for you Zackattack 1. Really fixed the green score this time, it turns green when it is supposed to. 2. Fixed the eating bug. Now your health goes up when you eat the fruit. No delay no matter when you have your meal. 3. You no longer can eat a fruit unless you show visible damage about 32 points 4. Your health bar and fruit count flash red when you take damage. 5. When the left difficulty is set to "B" you can carry 4 cloud fruit. When it is set to "A" you can only carry 3. 6. When the right difficulty is set to "B" the tree's poison does not affect you. When it is set to "A" you will take damage slowly over time. 7. The Gizzle Wap's bouncing sound is timed better to how he moves. The tap sound is on the down animation. 8. Added an opening animation after the titlescreen and the music plays. 9. The Coud Fruit Float a little higher. 10. If you are a good shot you can hit the cloud fruit with the Zazzle Fly. I think I'm at the home stretch on this game. GIZZLEWAPdpc62.bas.bin

Not healing right away is a remnant of only being able to eat during a fight. I'll try to fix that tonight. You actually can't eat if you're fully healed. You were probably damaged so slightly that it didn't show on the health bar. It's possible to eat all your fruit at once if you eat while you are being hit. "Riding the Ant" or being carried by the crab are bad times to have a meal. The Invicta Minors are so aggressive they don't give you a lot of time set yourself up for an attack. You might have to hunker down and let them come to you. Also try to touch a Humming Duck before taking on the Invicta. The added speed helps a lot. With the additional speed you can do a flying Jump Drop that can be an effective strategy, but you can expect to take damage. Hope that helps.

I paid about 25 for mine with no manual, but I got Death Trap at the same time.

Yeah, I didn't press down fast enough. They start hitting really hard at that level. Anyway, here's the next update. Update 61 1. Fixed the score so it will stay green if you collect more than the required amount of fruit. It will return to yellow if you eat enough fruit to drop you below the quota. 2. There are 8 levels now. 7 Invicta Minors and 1 Invicta Prime. 3. Decreased the difficulty of the 6th and 7th Invicta. It was nearly impossible to beat them. 4. 3rd and 4th Invicta now have help in their fight. 5. Invicta Minors now come in different colors. 1st and 2nd Green 3rd and 4th Gold 5th and 6th Red 7th Gray GIZZLEWAPdpc61.bas.bin

Hey Zackattack, I just fixed that bug. Bonehead coding on my part. I'll post the next revision soon. Maybe tonight. Great score! I just got my high score with out cheating and changing the variable. I finally made it to the 7th Invica Minor. I usually can't make it past the fifth.

Update 60 1. Fixed and aligned playfield colors 2. Tightened up the code, scanline count was hitting 263 during the fight loop 3. Invicta Prime fight is more managable 4. Sound shuts off properly in the finale animation 5. Score color now turns green when you have collected enough fruit to remove the tree and signal the Gizzle Wap to return to the Zazzle field. You still need to drop off fruit when you have 1-3 fruit.. GIZZLEWAPdpc60.bas.bin

testing

If you're running Stella the easiest way to check is pressing ALT+L. Your scanline count and FPS will be in the top left corner. NTSC should not exceed 262. There are other ways to check. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fatariage.com%2Fforums%2Ftopic%2F181081-keeping-track-of-the-scanline-count-with-stella%2F&ei=9XVPVa6uA8OwggTAqoGAAQ&usg=AFQjCNFqZAGXoXxyuGaa1cvDoqBiUdCgaQ&sig2=QGhV6t4XCNSBplQB5EoglA

Wow! I love the game play, concept and level progression. You have outdone yourself. You might want to tighten up your code though. You're over on your scanline count. It looks fine on Stella, but it will probably roll or flicker on real hardware. Otherwise, great job!

Sadly, no. This gives me an excuse to play it some more.

Quick update 59 1. Fixed a bug where if a cloud fruit is eaten while the Pegsi pull the tree out of the ground they would come back and replant the tree. That's it tonight. Thank you Graywest for finding this bug. GIZZLEWAPdpc59.bas.bin

Hey Graywest. I wrote that song when I was about 15 on an old Tandy Color computer 2. The screen stretching is a function of the DPC+ kernal. There are 6 DFxFRACINC that allow you to set the resolution of the playfield and backround. Thanks for finding that bug. I'll test it today to see if I can recreate it. I guess you mastered the jump drop move, which currently is the only way to beat the ant. I hear from other play testers that beating the ant is the biggest challenge. Thank you for the feed back.

Thanks iesposta. I almost used stretching to set different playfield levels. If I had given this function more thought early in development I probably would have. The simplest example that comes to mind would be making one screen a pit, then stretch the center 2 defrac values to make a hill, something along those lines. The Gizzle Wap originated as bedtime stories we would make up at night. My daughter came up with the good characters and I did the evil characters. She keeps asking me to put in other characters she made up but sadly there's no room in the graphics bank and some don't fit in the story.

This game is so much fun. What happened this it?

Update 58 1. Added harmony to the title screen music. 2. Changed some colors of the trees to look better on a regular TV 3. Made the lair triggers more conspicuous. 4. Made the lair easier to see specially on a regular TV GIZZLEWAPdpc58.bas.bin

Sorry forgot to take the scoring out of testing mode. GIZZLEWAPdpc57.bas.bin

Update 56 1. Fixed a bug where the finale would not play correctly. 2. Fixed a bug where the red tree would appear briefly when the screen changed. 3. The Invicta minor and the Invicta Prime now have separate hit routines. 4. Cleaned up the title screen slightly. Attached are the rough drafts of the Instruction manual and cartridge labels. The Gizzle Wap Game Instructions.pdf GIZZLEWAPdpc56.bas.bin

Update 55 1. The Finale animation is complete after you beat the Invicta Prime. 2. The Cloud fruit is now animated and moves slightly. 3. You may eat cloud fruit between fights as well as during fights. 4. The Red tree is animated in all scenes. 5. Fixed a bug that let you kill the invicta minors too easily. 6. Overall difficulty has increased slightly. 7. Level 5 and 6 Invicta minors have help in their fights. Thank you to iesposta for helping me find more space. GIZZLEWAPdpc55.bas.bin

I don't know if you guys have seen this thread. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/236921-dpc-collision-example-program/ But I've implemented this routine in my game and it works quite well. Basically what it does is compares the x and y value of player0 and compares it to the x and y value of the other objects. Whichever is closest jumps. I also did the same thing as iesposta where I used the ball and superimposed a player sprite.

Thank's ZackAttack. Being able to heal yourself really improved the game play. Now you have to make a decision, do I heal myself or give the fruit to the butterflies. I thought about the moth trajectory early on in development and I really wanted a missile you would fire and have very little control over. I used to make model rockets as a kid and one of my first models wasn't balanced right and I launched it with a "C" engine. That thing flew all over the place. But that's kind of what wanted. I think controlling the direction would make the game too easy and predictable. I'm also out of room in that bank. So I'm not sure I'm a good enough code cruncher to add that.

This is sweet! I didn't realize you were working on this.

A quick up update 1. Changed the title screen. 2. Added music to the title screen 3. You can only carry 3 fruit now 4. Bosses are a little harder to beat. 5. The Humming Duck's speed boost no longer stacks. (you could move way too fast) GIZZLEWAPdpc53.bas.bin