Jan Hermanns

There is already a VCS game with a water flooding pit: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/174302-the-wicked-father/

There are two ways of doing this. The easiest way is for you to PM Albert (he owns AA and the store) and get him to check your game out. If he puts it in the store he'll make the carts on demand and you'll get paid a royalty on each game sold. The 2nd is to find somebody to make the carts for you as a limited run. You'd open a pre-order thread for a couple of weeks to gauge demand then take payment (not everybody on the pre-order wants the cart when it comes to payment time). Get the number of carts made that have been paid for and then ship them out. Either way you'll need a cart label designed for the game. You might also want to think about making a PAL version for the people outside the USA. Thank you so much! I'll contact Albert, when the final version is done. And I'll definitely do a PAL version - I'm from germany

Really nice tunes! But unfortunately I don't have enough space left :-(

All in all most people seem to like the game, so I'm quite proud What I plan to do for final release is: 1. Add sound FX 2. Add at least 3 more levels, of varying difficulty 3. Change the name/titlescreen. This hurts the most, because I like the title very much and it was a lot of work to "emulate" the Mario-Font. The title was intended as a homage to two of my all time favorite games namely "The Great Giana Sisters" and "Super Mario Bros.". But when people hear the title they either think of a horizontal scrolling platformer and get dissapointed or they didn't get it all (I think that's because they are to young and don't know "Giana Sisters"). Though I'm not sure, what the new title will be. 4. Design a graphically applealing booklet/manual - I'm looking forward to this task... :-) I would love to see it released as a cart. Do you know whom I have to sleep with, to make that happen?

So far, thanks everybody for your feedback. This is really, really helpful! Some of you pointed out, that sound FX would be nice and I think that's a valid claim. It's now on top of my list. About the 4K limit... I set myself this limit for two reasons: 1. To force myself to program very efficiently 2. To get things done I think point 1 is self explaining, but let me elaborate on point 2. There is only so much stuff that fits into 4K, so sooner or later you hit the limit and if you made the right decisions you have a nice little game. If there is no such limit you can program forever and ever and never come to an end, because better is the enemy of good. Maybe I'll do a sequel with big endbosses, soundtrack, moving platforms, hidden bonus levels, hiscores, timer, lots of different enemies and whatnot. This is all doable, but right now I stick with the 4K limit to get things done!

You could use bank switching if you need more space. I know, but as I said I want to keep things within 4K of size

I wish I could use them, but due to technical limitations this is not possible (there is no processor time left in the kernal).

Brian, my problem is, that I want to keep everything oldschool in 4K! This means tradeoffs - lots of tradeoffs. This here is one: Would you rather have more enemies or more levels to play?

It's a he and his name is Blinky! Nice idea, but the leveleditor is currently a little difficult to use (it's just a LISP program, that transforms textfiles into assembler sourcecode). But I see what I can do...

I hate to disappoint you, but horizontal smooth scrolling is not possible on the VCS :-(

Voila, it's me playing the first level:

One of the early prototypes could scroll the screen down - but that was boring, because you could only loose a life if you hit an enemy. I rather make the levels a bit easier...

Well, adding additional levels is no problem, because I have a leveleditor. The hard part is making good levels that are fun to play, i.e. levels that are neither too easy nor too difficult. So, it is very interesting for me to hear what you people say about the level of difficulty!

Thank you! May I ask you some questions? 1. Is it too difficult (i.e. is it challenging or frustrating)? If so, which part(s) did you find too difficult? 2. Did you play all three levels?

thank you, this demo version includes three levels, full version will have 7-10 Levels...

GIANA BROS Demo Release My goal was to make a little platform game that is actually fun to play ...and has superb animations ...and smooth scrolling ...and sophisticated controls ...and is only 4K in size! Controls: Joystick Left/Right - move left/right Joystick Up or Fire - jump Any feedback welcome - especially if anybody could test this on real hardware. I hope you like it! Jan P.S. Keep the following in mind: a) the faster you move the longer your jumps b) collecting four gold nuggets gives an extra life GianabrosIV.bin

Thank you very much! I didn't know about that "GRP0 68/3" timing thing.

Hello, I'm desperate, I attached a stripped-down 2-scanline kernal, that shows a phenomenon I don't understand. Here is a little run-down, of what the kernal does: - In the first scanline the playfield gets drawn as well as sprite GRP1 (only to trigger GRP0, see below). - In the second scanline the playfield gets disabled and Sprite GRP0 gets drawn. - In order to position Sprite GRP0 vertically accurate I use the VDELP0 register. By and large this works fairly well, except for the leftmost side of the screen. The attached kernal shows a sprite at a neuralgic position. The left side of the sprite is messed up, whereas the right side gets drawn correctly. Can anybody explain to me, why accurate vertical positioning at the leftmost side of the screen does not work? Or am I doing something wrong? kind regards, Jan stripdown.asm.txt