Sergioz82

This is a great port, it's very well-finished: the great 8 bit rendition of the tune, the street names on the map, the variety in buildings and ghosts, the car equipping part.. I love it! I remember playing this game on the Atari2600 when I was a little kid but it was a butchered version.. yours is at Master System level

Thank you very much! The background story is a knight has been killed by the sorcerer who overthrown the king. Longing for revenge, a god granted his wish so he allowed to return in the material world through a magical artifact that serves his spirit as a temporary body, the sphere. He then has to find his way to the sorcerer's retreat and defeat him. This is the idea I have in mind for this game but I'll work on the story when the game is almost done. Edit: the tomb in the first map is the knight's tomb

Thank you very much! I think I'll use the possession for collecting items (keys, most likely), opening doors and kill enemies, all things that the wisp can't do by itself.

Hi everyone! I finally have an update on the game! There are some new features, I'll go in order: 1) The energy and mana bars are now active: contact with enemies will lower the green energy bar while staying in flight will consume the blue mana bar. Once the mana runs out, the sphere will fall to the ground. Staying on the ground will recharge the mana. 2) The graphics engine manages enemies with multiple sprites, the zombie for example has 4 sprites: 2 for primary color and 2 for secondary color 3) Completed the "Possession" power which allows you to transfer the spirit in the sphere into the body of enemies and then use them to do the dirty work and, if necessary, lose the skinon your behalf😄 The power can be activated when close to an enemy (in the future only some, now it is active for everyone). Selecting the icon again will return the spirit to the sphere. If it has free space to take off he will return to the air, otherwise he will remain on the ground. I have to say it was a lot of work to program but I expected it... the hardest part was the possession effect (and it still doesn't work very well, sometimes it doesn't behave as it should and there is still an important step to do ), it took me more than 3 months to get it working decently.. The second part of the hard work was to ensure that the patterns were loaded dynamically at each map change as well as their assignment to the enemy sprites because if, as in the video, I enter the next map as a zombie I will have to make sure to bring its pattern but not the sphere pattern, or if I go back to where I left the sphere I have to also load the sphere patterns and so on 😵‍ However the most complex part is over, now I should move forward a little faster

Wow great port! As others said, this would have been a hit in the 80s

I have tried Warlords of the Rings on real hw and works fine, but I haven't tried They come at night, I played it on Classic99.

I'm sure the trail is thinner on real hardware (I use random numbers to szc the bitmap byte and make black spots in the trail) and for the same reason also the flame effect when the sphere is not moving is different than on emulator. To get random numbers I use Compute!'s beginners guide method: I start with random number at >83C0 then I use that number as pointer to a memory location and I get the value in there, then I SRL as many times as needed. I don't know if this method works slightly differently on emulator. Since I use szc from a random value to modify the trail I would say the emulator has more zeroes in memory locations than real TI.

The very origin of the trail thing is in those trails you see in old VHS cameras of the 80s when a light is in the frame and the camera is not steady. I thought that would be a nice graphic effect to reproduce on a CRT. I tried the game on real TI + CRT and it looks better than on Emulator+LCD. The trail is thinner because I think random numbers are better on real TI than on emulators, I alredy noticed it with Spac Man where bonuses are more random while on emulators you get mainly boots. Anyway, the first use I found for the idea was to make this ghostly trail, then after the early attempts I started building the game around it. I didn't mention that, but the game I took inspiration from is Abe's Odissey.

Ah yes, now I see more similarities.

I don't know that game, you mean this one? I watched a video on YT and indeed there is some resemblance in the spooky setting. I can tell my sphere is basically cat's sphere in Wizball, but it was more like an unconscious choice, I realized it in a second moment.

Wow, I didn't think that momentum was so fast to implement, good Thank you very much for the code

Thank you very very much for your appreciation! I really hope the finished game will hold to expectations Basically I had this idea of making a ghostly trail in bitmap mode and now the game is taking shape around it. In broad terms I know where I want to go, but things will take a more definite direction during development. I have in mind 5 levels with a discrete number of maps with alternate routes to take but I'm keeping the level design for the end, my current goal is to complete all the code for a complete run through level 1 (sound excluded). Now that you make think of it I can't recall similar games on TI.. maybe Tutankham? Thanks for the suggestions, I'll disable the screen during map change. About the momentum I like the idea a lot, now I'm going to focus on implementing the 3rd control mode which is a very delicate part and there will be some limitations to overcome but once done I can think of momentum (which I don't know how to do it honestly, I'll have to look around for some ideas) About a boxed version, I'd really love to, however first I have to finish the game

Hi, I have a new update for my game I finally added enemies. At the moment I made ants, bats and spiders. Ants are harmless and can transport you, but they can also push you out the platform or in a hole. Spiders and bats will damage you (but for now I still have to write the damage routine). At a later time there will be other types of enemies I added one of the powers I have in mind: fire element. When the sphere touches a flame (in flight mode), the trail will become red. When this power is on the sphere can burn its way through some elements of the maps like vegetation. The power up is temporary and the duration is indicated by the icon at bottom right of the panel. The map modification is permanent so if the player leaves and then returns in the map all the burnt blocks are removed. I'd like to make this an animated sequence but I don't know how much it is going to stress the processor, so for the moment I take advantage of bitmap mode: when the trail goes through the vegetation it changes the block color to red so.. it's on fire! I implemented a sprite rotation method. This time I tried the reverse system: in even frames the sprites are transferred to VDP from lower to higher while in odd frames it's higher to lower About sprites, the mode is set at magnification 3. The engine can manage 2 sprites enemies and 1 sprite enemies, animated or not animated (1 sprite non animated examples are the moving blocks in the last screen) I have one last big step to make (a third control mode), after that the worst part should be behind.

Oh ok. I'm using Emacs and I'm not very used to it, I saw there's an option to change the text encoding, I'll try to set it to UTF-8. Besides, sometimes I code on Crimson Editor on Windows 10, probably I also messed up something by moving the files back and forth. I'll try UTF-8, if iy won't work I'll delete the word, it's not important. Thanks for the support!

Ok, I'll send it in a email