TwentySixHundred

Thought id have a run on City Defence tonight for kicks - not too bad - found myself panicking multiple time during the run and as a result many little mistakes 16,713

Hi James, i missed the HSC games on the stream however went back and rewatched later. Great effort and score with City Defence considering it's basically your first time playing in it's current state. The game is definitely an acquired taste much like Missile Command. Takes alot of practice and timing is everything (much like Bass Fishing). Thanks for giving CD a run and yeah Expert difficulty is no joke, so without a fluent feel for the game, it's intense. Cheers mate 👍

Thanks mate Yeah there is some reasons behind the powerstation and how it came to be. First off with the game in general, rather then trying to push the 2600's limits i went in a different direction with CD. I wanted to concentrate more on the gameplay aspect and strategy, more-so then a clone of Missile Command. Hence the reason the graphics are nothing spectacular. The powerstation actually became a feature after thinking long and hard about a limitation of BASIC itself. By default bB does not utilize the outer reaches of playfield (P0) to save machine cycles unlike assembler. So once again rather then pushing the limits i decided to fill that space with an additional "special" building. This worked in my favor as with the early builds of CD i noticed many would play defensive protecting the inner city and could play wave after wave without much of a threat. So by adding the special building that actually cripples the player and prevents them from gaining a high score. It actually pulls the player out to take risks and protect it. Having the faster targeting system is an advantage as you can save more buildings. The more buildings saved per round the higher the rewards after each wave. So from what was a limitation became a feature of risk verses reward that then later improved gameplay 😉 I know the game is an acquired taste much like Missile Command however im glad you enjoy it 👍

Great score! Im glad you enjoyed the the homebrew games this season and thanks for the kind words 👍

I really should have compiled a PAL50 version so you could have played on Harmony cart with the correct colours. Sorry about that mate, nice score though 👍 Seaweed Assault is a great game, Duane really did well with that game. Just thought id let you know that the homebrews can be played on a Harmony cart as City Defence for one was never released on physical cart. You can also use the Stella emulator if you wish however that's entirely up to you 👍

How could i forget, although i know i limited myself to two games for the Gen/MD. Streets of Rage 2 was definitely a favorite of mine along with Lotus 2 R.E.C.S and the Strike series. Too many great games i had spent hours playing it's hard to shorten the list 😉

It's all good, no stress i had just posted my cars to get the ball rolling. Although most clubs i have noticed get little traffic so to be honest i have kinda forgot about them lol. I have no issues with your post Gold 👍

No they are not however the method used is fairly standard practice. Sound is not my strong point and to be honest i really don't like the music rendition at the title screen. It was ok when i first started coding the game however i find it to just be ear piercing and kinda lame. I really should have removed it for HSC considering how many times runners would have to hear it when restarting. It probably deters people from wanting to play it IMO. I apologize in advance to those who find the music as irritating as i do.

Some great scores by the runners, and i thought id drop in to give some helpful tips. With these tips i will be focusing more on how the targeting system works. One issue i have noticed with friends and family that have played is they tend to want to mash the fire button and they panic. The key is you can only lock on one target at a time until your defense missile has made a full cycle (by design). It's all about precisely well timed shots and making sure your timings are correct. The missile itself does not take out the ICBM's (2.5d type layout). So the explosion itself is what will make your shots successful. Timing is everything and it can take awhile to get the feel for it however you're basically wanting the ICBM to fall into the explosion. Taking into account of the ICBM droprate then in addition the travel time of your defense missile along with the target position are all factors to consider. I can't stress enough that timing is everything! Good luck

City Defence - 12,362 Not too sure if it's fair or valid to play my own game however i will just post my score anyway

Doggone It - 20,386 Ms. Galactopus - 8,275 Not too bad although i could definitely improve, just strapped for time at this moment and only played a single round of both. Great games!

First and foremost id like to thank the moderators for choosing my game to be ran this season. Ms.Galactopus and Doggon_it are great games, also congrats to Ric Pryor and Armscar Coder for making the cut 👍. As promised i will be giving some tips and im sure the runners will find many more that im not aware of along the way. To begin with for those who prefer console console reset over joyfire make sure to set the console to BW mode so the game can only be restarted by the reset console switch. Piece of advice is to take note of point rewards from remaining builds at the end of each wave. Depending on the size of the building depends on the reward. So if you have two ICBM's about to destroy your buildings and can only take-out one, it's important to save the larger building as it will yield more bonus points. Scoring: single story + 10 points at end of round two story + 20 points at end of round three story + 30 points at end of round four story + 40 points at end of round five story + 50 points at end of round six story + 60 points at end of round max total + 730 points at end of round slow warhead + 20 points each shot medium warhead + 40 points each shot fast warhead + 60 points each shot loss of maingun - 200 points loss of powerstation - 100 points The other tip is to protect that powerstation! If it gets taken out, your targeting system will only run at 50% crippling your ability to venture out to the far reaches of the city. The game runs off a month by month system per wave and season to season per yearly cycle. This means after 3 months (waves) you will enter the next season. It's important to note that if your powerstation was taken out, you need to survive the rest of the season whilst it gets restored. I will drop in to provide more tips if not found by others and questions, i may even compete Make sure to use the .bin provided by Vocelli and not the development .bin. Also make sure to run on expert mode as it was compiled specifically for HSC for validity purposes. Thanks and i hope everyone enjoys the line up of homebrew games this season 👍

Well that's tough news and always a sad time when a member is lost

Loving the artwork - Knight Guy is coming along tremendously well 👍

Thanks for sharing @Lillapojkenpåön the smooth scrolling effect looks great. Id love to see if this is an viable option for the 7800 game i am currently working on. Adds polish rather then abrupt screen transitions that can leave the player needing to adjust their bearings when suddenly appearing on the next screen 👍

Thank you so much for sharing @willbilly , great backstory and an interesting one at that. You can see the resemblance of Captain Comic in the demo from Comics (pixels) space suit to the "bug-eyes" enemies. They even behave in a similar fashion and the spiral enemies behave like the "beach balls". Im assuming Michael had the idea back in 87 when creating this demo then went on to revamp the project for Captain Comic in 89. Another feature i spotted, that was not added until Captain Comic 2, was the background wall posters. This was absent from the first game IIRC and interesting to see what id call essentially a prototype. It's almost like a look back into the early stages of development for Captain Comic. Once again thanks for sharing this info, highly appreciated 👍👍

Here is a small interview with Michael, it's short and judging by the website layout im thinking it's fairly old. Yeah the NES port suffered with the out of place music renditions. Apparently he didn't work for Color Dreams and only met them at a trade show, although who exactly knows if that was a repretiable source. It's a shame because from a graphical standpoint the NES version was quite nice (besides the monochrome captain comic himself). Edit: I miss interpreted what you said about Michael working on it for Color Dreams rather then working for Color Dreams themselves 👍

Thanks Will, that could really help for design and aesthetics keeping the game true to the originals. At the same time i don't want to completely rip off Michael Denio's (original game creator) work. Thanks that would really help 👍 Thanks Karl i had never thought to change the palette entries, that way it wouldn't effect other sprites that share the same pallet. Changing on the fly made that pallet utterly useless for other sprites as those would also flicker 👍 Cheers Mike, yeah i am yet to understand how this works. I have noticed in the sample programs this method is used. The part i don't understand is how these row of pixels doesn't get displayed as part of the sprite? So far im using the built in ADS sprite editor for sprites and Paint.NET for tilemaps. To prevent the colours from mismatching i had worked out that having 4 blanks {transperant+the three colours} (also useful for full coloured tiles) at the start of the tilemap sprite-sheet prevents missmatching ie; transparent first followed by the desired colours. Just not exactly sure how this method works for sprites, however it does work for numeric and alpha. Im guessing 7800Basic is smart enough to interoperate what they are? I probably should look into Gimp i have heard good things about it. Thanks for the kind words and support mate 👍 Thanks mate, yeah who knows where this project will lead to. One things for sure, i too prefer the MS-DOS version as it's the one i grew up with. Having said that the NES version IMO does have it's standout features but no where near as good. Guess we will see how everything goes and there is no doubt the 7800 community is very helpful. So there is no shortage of talented guidance when asking for help

Wow awesome update, both yourself and Mike have been busy 👍. Thanks for the rolling development of ADS, much appreciated Matt

Thanks, yeah the palettes seem to be one the strangest parts to the 7800. Some animated sprites will start flickering with incorrect colours each frame and need to be corrected on the fly by switching the pallet values. It's definitely one part i really need to look into.

First release ROM of this WIP - feel free to have a play around on the first level Far from perfect and lots of work to go however it is playable Latest Build: Captain Comic.bas.a78

Looks Great! Thanks for the update cant wait to try it out 👍

Looking really good so far, nice job 👍

Best advice i have if you have no idea where to start is to make it simple. Get some sprites on the screen and start moving them around with the joystick ect. Learn about playfields and screen transitions along with TIA registers so you can change colours and create some sounds. It's best to experiment first with these simple fundamental parts then you can progress into something more like a game. The learning curve is steep to begin with but gets easier over time