Good homebrews?

[Good homebrews?]

I completely understand the negativity towards batari Basic, it allows people to quickly toss together simple blocky levels and say "Hey look! I've made a game!"

This sadly gives batari Basic a bad rap, since if the same programmer had to do things from the ground up in assembly the quality should be improve due to the effort involved. This of course assuming the programmer has self respect and puts forth an effort to make a decent game.

 

bB with the DPC+ kernel is a good thing! It allows people to quickly(subjective) prototype a game, and if they put forth some effort into customizing the kernel a bit, they can get some amazing games done with it.

 

EggVenture is my "Hello World" into bB's DPC+ kernel, and represents a slightly different approach to puzzle/action/adventure gameplay.

But in truth, there isn't really anything specially amazing about it right now. The levels are blocky albeit being multicolored, the focus is more on the sprites and puzzle elements, and it doesn't showcase any neat sounds or music.

 

What it DOES however have going for it is a dedicated programmer willing to see it through to the end, and improve it along the way

 

Language doesn't matter, only the dedication of those who will use it.

[Boulder Dash (R) Demo Release]

What a great port this turned out to be. It's in many ways better than the dos version I played in my early days.

[Epic Adventure]

Pretty nice!

There are some screen wrapping issues where carrying an object to the side of the screen and then dying, causes the object to be placed on the next screen over sometimes in an inaccessible location.

The Cave Troll also saw me while invisible, as I was carrying the amulet and thus ran into the afore mentioned issue.

 

I <3 adventure games!

Hey Scumsoft,

 

Thanks for trying it out! Which object were you having problems with? The ring acts as a magnet so there shouldn't be any inaccessible locations (unless you're at the very top or bottom of the map - I haven't fixed that yet...). If it's the ring itself, hold down the button to "attract" it to you.

 

When you have the amulet, an enemy will still kill you if it happens to run into you, which was probably the case when the Cave Troll got you. You're invisible, not immortal!

 

Todd

 

BTW - great job on EggVenture! Very unique and fun.

 

Thanks, still working on EggVenture. Release testing has shown a few things that need redone in the game, so it's still not quite finished yet

 

I should have taken a screenshot of what happened, I was up one screen from the starting castle holding the amulet, the amulet was at the bottom of the screen so it wasn't shown, then the Cave Troll appeared and killed me. After respawning the amulet was in the top left of the castle screen. I'm not sure if this is a required item or if it shows up again somewhere. But this is the gist of the bug, if it's really even that.

 

[Edit]

I would also like to credit PAC-MAN-RED for his shown efforts here. Many of us can't do great sprite art like his and really appreciate the fact that he has released so many quality sprites for everyone to freely use. All he asked in return is that he gets credited for his work, which most of us will gladly do. EggVenture uses his Spider and Bat sprites, I did the rest and it shows. His look far more animated and detailed than mine do.

 

PAC-MAN-RED's sprites are very pleasant to look at, so well done scripting them into your game!

[Bug Report Thread]

I'm not really sure if this is a bug or a coding error on my part, but if I try and evaluate score such as:

 

score = 111111 :rem Value is example only, any value works
if score = 0 then goto Game_Over :rem this always evaluates true

It always evaluates true regardless of the scores value, is there a special way to go about checking this?

[Problem using variables and DIM]

Also I think it doesn't like double underscores in labels

[Harmony DPC+ programming]

Ok, I seem to have figured it out.

 

COPY2RAM #<source,destination,amount,mode ;Have to pass low pointer of source data

 

           MAC COPY2RAM
.source      SET {1}
.destination SET {2}
.amount      SET {3}
.mode        SET {4}

           LDA #<.destination
           STA DF0LOW
           LDA #(>.destination) & $0F
           STA DF0HI

           lda #<.source
           sta PARAMETER ;byte pointer increments on write
           lda #((>.source) & $0f) | (((>(.source)) / 2) & $70)
           sta PARAMETER
           lda #0        ;Using DataFetcher #0
           sta PARAMETER
           lda #.amount  ;256 bytes copy max
           sta PARAMETER
           lda .mode
           sta CALLFUNCTION
           ENDM

[pong physics]

Like this?

[Epic Adventure]

Pretty nice!

There are some screen wrapping issues where carrying an object to the side of the screen and then dying, causes the object to be placed on the next screen over sometimes in an inaccessible location.

The Cave Troll also saw me while invisible, as I was carrying the amulet and thus ran into the afore mentioned issue.

 

I <3 adventure games!

[Game Idea!]

The physics would be the easy part, matching the graphics to falling objects would be a tricky part but not impossible.

[EggVenture 2600 (Beta testing feedback WIP)]

No problem. I'm not even sure if scorecolors: is documented, but when I ran into the same issue a short while back and dug it out of the bB source.

So all in all the only problem I see left is the Harmony pointer issues then.

I believe I've tracked it down to me not reloading the player data on every frame, as this would require almost a major rewrite on each of my subroutines. There is lot's of bankswitching going on to load the right GFX. I hope there is another way to fix this, as it shouldn't forget which data has been loaded like it does.

 

By the way, cute ending sequence!

It makes me laugh though I wonder if I should leave the score on the screen instead of rebooting and just fade to black instead.

Since the game is puzzle linear there isn't much variation on the scoring I'm finding out. I think I may adjust the scoring so it's much more dependent on how much time it took to retrieve the eggs, instead of fixed points for actions taken.

If you find the easter egg sequence then you can get a score bonus or 25k on easy and 50k on hard.

Right now there isn't a way to max out the score, which I think is a goal of most games on the 2600.

 

OK, I've decided to rework the score system then and since I've managed to free up more space, I might be able to add some other stuff to the game.

Thanks for helping me test.

 

[edit]

It may be smart to constantly readjust the DFxFRACINC sizes when changing the length of pfcolor or bkcolor statements. I think this always pads it out to the playfield length.

 

pfcolors:
$00
end

This takes 35 bytes when DF(0-3)FRACINC is set to 32 instead of a single byte. But adjusting DF(0-3)FRACINC to = 1 takes up only a byte.

[EggVenture 2600 (Beta testing feedback WIP)]

I wasn't aware of that table, using it fixes the tiger strip color. Thanks!

[Next version of bB]

Oh yes thank you.

[Lines of Code]

EggVenture - 3333 O_o

[Next version of bB]

While developing EggVenture I've built a small wish list on features I would have found most useful.

 

• I'd say 75% of the code I've written in my game pertains to decided what collided with what for the virtual sprites. Things would be much nicer and spacier in my code if I were able to use "if collision(player0,player2) then yada yada yada" instead of checking positions all the time. I don't know how we might manage this, that's why this is a wish list.
  
• I find that having to specify player data (per) player is costly, say for instance I wanted to use my EGG graphics for player2 and player3 in the same playfield, I can't find a method to reference a single EGG definition for both sprites, instead you must specify it individually for each player.
  player2:
  (insert egg gfx data)
  end
  player3:
  (insert egg gfx data)
  end
  This is a double definition to single sprite data. It greatly limits how many of the same objects I want to use in a single playfield.
  If instead I were able to say player2 = EGG :player3 = EGG and have the pointers set appropriately this would alleviate this issue and free up rom space.
  
• I know the language is BASIC(pun intended), but I would LOVE to clean up the code a bit with incremental operators such as player0y += 1 or player0y++
  and the decremental counters -= and --, any plans to incorporate them?
  

Once again I'm not sure how cumbersome this may be to implement on your end, but it would greatly simplify certain conditions that I've encountered which made me wish for such things.

[Game Idea!]

I was also thinking the same thing, I would call it Angry Pixels:)

[what`s happening in Atariage?]

Shhh don't tell him!

[Boulder Dash (R) Demo Release]

Looking forward to it! Using the DPC+ chip for this one?

[EggVenture 2600 (Beta testing feedback WIP)]

No problem, it's Jurell Silks.

[Harmony DPC+ programming]

I'm back to working on my DPC+ project, and I'm trying to put together a macro with this info, however it tends to copy the address of the source data rather than the source data itself. But it at least is copying something to the correct destination address, so that works.

 

           MAC COPY2RAM
.source      SET {1}
.dest        SET {2}
.amount      SET {3}
.mode        SET {4}

           LDA #<.dest
           STA DF0LOW
           LDA #>.dest
           STA DF0HI
           
           lda #<.source
           sta PARAMETER ;byte pointer increments on write
           lda #((>.source) & $0f) | (((>(.source - $2000)) / 2) & $70)
           sta PARAMETER
           lda #0        ;Using DataFetcher #0
           sta PARAMETER
           lda #.amount  ;256 bytes copy max
           sta PARAMETER
           lda .mode
           sta CALLFUNCTION
           ENDM

 

I think I'm missing something obvious in the way I'm passing the address values.

[EggVenture 2600 (Beta testing feedback WIP)]

PAL version posted, both versions updated with pause feature.

[EggVenture 2600 (Beta testing feedback WIP)]

Release candidate 1 posted

PAL version soon to follow. Need to take a bit of a break right now.

 

Have fun everyone! Remember to post any bugs or gameplay issues here so I can squish them before final release.

 

[edit]

RC2 posted, fixed some bugs which would prevent completing the game.

[EggVenture 2600 (Beta testing feedback WIP)]

I should have the a release candidate up later today, running into space issues and need to restructure a few things.

I've redesigned the puzzles to fix a few things, so look forward to the real release

 

Sadly I don't think I can add music, but at least the gameplay is feeling much nicer now.

[EggVenture 2600 (Beta testing feedback WIP)]

Use Stella latest version 3.4.1

[edit]Thank you RT, yes I meant use Stella 3.4.1

[EggVenture 2600 (Beta testing feedback WIP)]

I'm taking notes guys, so keep all the comments coming.

@dwane413 If you still can't locate where the key goes:

 

then I need to highlight the area left of the castle where it's supposed to be dropped

 

 

@bomberpunk

Sorry but it plays nothing like Toki Tori, although a 2600 version of that game would be awesome.

 

I've finished the ending sequence a little while ago. So from here on out it's all bug fixes, gameplay tweaks and some music if I can squeeze that in.

[EggVenture 2600 (Beta testing feedback WIP)]

Mwahahaha!

Well done actually. That surprise bat can be really tricky to get past.

 

I'll just leave it in PAL60 then. Do you have any suggestions for the game? any adjustments that would make it more fun or less aggravating? Seeing as it's my first real game, I could use any and all suggestions since my own testing doesn't reflect everyone else's viewpoint.