cmadruga

... and here are the infamous moving magma walls. A productive weekend overall 🙂 Now, to the tentacle monster!

Artrag, pls check your inbox!

Thanks folks, it's been fun!

Thanks Arturo, to be honest I'm still playing with the encoding format a little bit. Will keep your suggestion in mind. Anyway, yesterday I implemented the magma raft. Here's how a level that uses it looks like. Next, will see if I can figure out those moving magma walls...

Good point, thematically a brick “cave” does not make much sense!

Some more tile combination tests...

Additional tile tests...

The walls that can be exploded are actually 1 tile wide and 2 tall. That applies to magma walls too. The crumbling pattern looks good, I will make sure to use it. However, it will rarely be seen: only when someone would try to bring down a wall with the laser. Going back to the question of 2600 vs non-2600 looks... So far I’ve been loosely following the rotation of colors used on the 2600 version across consecutive levels: brown, green, blue, gray, then back to brown. Is that a meaningful visual “homage” element to preserve? Or not really? I guess I’m torn.

Congrats TIX, you are now part of the Intellivision homebrew development scene. Your membership card is in the mail. Now you could use that advanced aesthetic sense to give me some tips on which tiles actually go well together...

The hero is made of 4 sprites (propeller, helmet, torso, legs), and the biggest bang for the buck from dynamic GRAM allocation would definitely come from the legs. The fuse effect using CS mode is something I’m not doing right now, but will add to the queue 🙂 I’m not using GROM for the laser animation right now... which patterns would you pick? One thing that is tricky is that the laser is supposed to be blocked by walls. That means the length of the laser beam needs to flex.

Good stuff, will see if I can turn something around between today and tomorrow that will showcase some of your work. Thanks for putting it all together!

Errr.. yes, I will admit that up to this point I've been wasting a lot of gram with animation frames. If sloppy gram utilization would become a bottleneck for fancy graphics (which it will if this were to head for a C64-like level of fanciness), I'd be open for using it differently.

Will keep that in mind, even though I have never done it in practice.

Thanks guys, as of now I'm using Color Stack mode. Mostly because it was the default mode, and I started this experiment by using exclusively the upper grom patterns to draw the cave. I'd be open to changing if that would be advised... Would also add that I'm using the upper portion of the screen:that's 20 x 6 tiles. Seemed to make the most sense given sprite proportions. Two rows of tiles used for each section of the screen (upper, middle, lower). (Plus a single row of tiles for the animated waves... so that's actually 20x7) As of now I'm using 52 out of 64 gram cards. Have 10 available to play with (would need to reserve at least 1 for the tentacle monster, and another for the raft), plus the following that could be reworked: - 2 tiles for solid blocks - 2 for lantern - 1 for still water (not the waves) - 2 for small / magma walls that can be exploded

Thanks for letting me know about your work, TIX! How do you run a .xex file? I’m not used to emulating Atari 8-bit systems. Or, if there is a video uploaded somewhere... I will take any help I can on graphics - just like on anything else, really. You seem to be real talented, and I’m flattered by your offer. However, since I’m just dabbling with this thing, I’d hate for you to invest a lot of your time producing something, and then not seeing it incorporated because the whole thing went nowhere. I’m also trying to get a read on people’s preferences towards upgrades. Not surprisingly, there seems to be a range. Folks in one extreme expect to see a replica of the 2600 version, which I totally get since I grew up always having to borrow someone else’s 2600 to get my HERO fix... On the other extreme, other folks seem to be very open to all sorts of upgrades: “let’s see how far we can take it” kind of thinking. Which I also totally get. I guess that means... - If you have any immediate suggestions on cave/wall tiles that wouldn’t take too much time on your side, I would be glad to test them. - I would leave any detailed animation/sprite work for later. Let me know your thoughts.