Magical Fairy Force: Demo video

[+Ryan Witmer]

As it approaches completion, I wanted to get a nice little demo video of Magical Fairy Force made to explain the game play and features,  So here's such a video, narrated by me and my cheap static-inducing microphone.

 

 

[+DamonicFury]

This looks great!  Looking forward to it!!!

[Cobra Kai]

Nice looking game! Thanks for the video.

[+Cafeman]

AverageSoftware,  thanks for the update and it looks like a fun new 5200 game. The anime-inspired artwork for the characters is in particular nice to look at.  Did you make those using Antic4 characters (5 color mode), I wonder?  

[+Ryan Witmer]

8 minutes ago, Cafeman said:

AThe anime-inspired artwork for the characters is in particular nice to look at.  Did you make those using Antic4 characters (5 color mode), I wonder?  

No, pretty much everything is ANTIC mode E.  I made the images by down-scaling the original high-resolution artwork, and then running the images through a small program I wrote that converted them to mode E compatible bytes and a color table that I could run through using an hblank interrupt.  I also ended up compressing the image data in the ROM, which saved a lot of space but unfortunately slowed down the draw rate, which you can see a bit in the video.

 

Getting the portraits to flip for the second player side was an adventure.  I originally reversed all the bytes on the fly during the image draw, which was super slow.  Later I ended up creating a "flip table" in an unused page of RAM that contained pre-reversed versions of all the bytes, and each byte of data could be used as an index into this table to get the reversed data very quickly.  That sped things up a lot and made the draw time a lot more tolerable.

[+Cafeman]

My first game years ago was all Antic e too.   Come to think of it ... my game also had clouds and lightning bolts!  But no fairies or special moves. Did you have to add an LMS jump halfway down the screen to your overall Display List? I seem to remember I did because it crossed a page boundary in memory  or something. Antic e takes up a lot of memory but is great for drawing per-pixel, unlike trying to draw using tiles/character sets which drives me nuts. 

 

I also enjoyed the zooming punch fist attack shown in the video.  

[+Ryan Witmer]

I have to LMS all over the place because I'm using vertical scrolling to move the falling objects down the playfield.  That boundary thing really caught me when I was doing Ratcatcher and I was just super confused for a while until I stumbled across the reason in some documentation somewhere.

 

I'm really looking forward to trying out some tileset stuff at some point.  I'm planning to use it for my next project, it will fit it really well.

[+sramirez2008]

Looking good! Like you said, you can never have enough trak-ball games. Can’t wait to try this out.?

[+Ryan Witmer]

Other than Xari Arena, is there another 5200 game that supports multiple trak-balls?  I'm not aware of any.

[+sramirez2008]

16 minutes ago, AverageSoftware said:

Other than Xari Arena, is there another 5200 game that supports multiple trak-balls?  I'm not aware of any.

I’m not aware of another. Xari Arena is a favorite of mine and my older son because of the multiple trak-ball support.

[+Mitch]

I believe RS tennis does.

 

Mitch

[+Ryan Witmer]

I've mentioned this here and there, but I'm also planning a greatly enhanced and expanded PC version of this game.  I've been doing some early work on it whenever my brain burns out on 6502 assembly, and I got this early version of the character select screen made up using the existing artwork.

 

 

The working title is Magical Fairy Force: Champion Edition and I definitely plan on adding more characters in this version, possibly as many as 8, doubling the cast.  I'm also planning an nice gallery mode with lots of screenshots and info on the Atari version.  I'm planning all new art for this version too, should be pretty slick.

[+Ryan Witmer]

Here's a quick video of me playing the basically complete single-player mode:

 

 

This is a cool video because you get to see several of the special attacks in action.  No narration from me this time, just game audio.

 

I've made tons of progress, and the game is very close to being done.  I have two show-stopping bugs that I need to address.  One of them I have a lead on, the other only seems to happen on real hardware so it's much more difficult to debug, but I have a few ideas.

 

The game content is pretty much complete.  I still need to write the endings (just a couple lines of text each, no room for anything else), and make a few tweaks and adjustments here and there.  I want to try to fit some simple music over the character select screen, but I'm not sure I'll have enough space on the cartridge.

 

With any luck, I'll have a test build that I can post later in the week for people to fool around with.

[Lynxpro]

On 5/12/2020 at 10:17 AM, AverageSoftware said:

Other than Xari Arena, is there another 5200 game that supports multiple trak-balls?  I'm not aware of any.

 

I can't remember if this has been asked already - probably has - but what about RealSports Curling? [single or multiple Trak-Balls]. Dan Kramer was asking me about your game yesterday but I didn't know for sure...

[+Ryan Witmer]

RealSports Curling doesn't support the trak-ball.  I remember considering the possibility when I was making it, and although it might have been really great for aiming it would have been terrible for sweeping.

 

I'm pretty sure I was even testing it for a while with a trak-ball hooked up to it just for fun.  It almost kinda worked for aiming even without dedicated code to handle the input, but not well enough for actual use.

[A Black Falcon]

It's looking great!  I'll buy the game for sure, the gameplay looks good and the 5200 trakball is of course amazing.  Two little questions though -- for versus mode will there be any display showing how many times each player has won?  Also are single matches human vs. human only?  Thanks.  It's great to see a story mode though, unfortunately I'll mostly have to play the game single player.

[+Ryan Witmer]

The single matches are human vs. human only, and there's no record tracking in the vs. mode.  I had thought of both of these things, but by the time I got everything else done I was pretty much out of cartridge space.  Perhaps when massive bank-switched carts become the norm on the 5200 I can do a new version with features and characters back-ported from the PC version that I've started working on.