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Dragon's Havoc - Side-Scrolling Shooter, Cartridge Available for Purchase and Demo available for download in thread!


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Another update before I have to shift focus (as the working week starts) - I made the rage mechanic a little more forgiving- I halved the "cool down" rate when you miss, which allows a *little* more recklessness, but still rewards someone being cautious with increased speed and rate-of-fire.

I'm also playing with a few new music tracks - swapping out some of my older ones I used from previous games.

 

DragonsHavoc_2_16_2021_Demo.bas.a78

DragonsHavoc_2_16_2021_Demo.bas.bin

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

ZeroPage Homebrew is playing DRAGON'S HAVOC on tomorrow's (Fri Feb 26, 2021) stream LIVE on Twitch at 6PM PT | 9PM ET | 2AM GMT! Hope everyone can watch!

 

 

Games:

 

 (SET VIDEO TO 1080P60 FOR FULL QUALITY)

 

 

 

Edited by ZeroPage Homebrew
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  • 9 months later...

Just to let folks know I'm still working on this - between work and other projects, I've been mainly chiseling away at pixels to get the backgrounds, enemies, and bosses designed.  I have a fairly configurable system for levels and enemy patterns, so now I need to take off my programmer hat and put on my designer and artist hats.  Here's a teaser of one of the levels:

 

DragonsHavocCrystal.thumb.png.6e1240ff0cf707e1b2f2f3ace065f3af.png

 

And animated in glorious faux-parallax motion:

 

DragonsHavoc4.gif.8109daad7027613c7ad8a62af94c6a57.gif

 

 


 

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  • 1 month later...

I've been making progress, even if I've been relatively quiet in the forum:

 

-Finalizing enemy types and behaviors, so I can finally finalize the level designs I've sketched out. 

-Getting the behaviors of the enemies finalized will also allow me to finish the bosses, who are all in place, but need their behaviors tinkered with, and I'll want to do that once I get their "entourage" enemies set properly.

 

Some other features that might be appreciated:

 

-I'm still messing around with how quickly "rage" depletes when you miss a target, but right now *I* think it's pretty forgiving :)

-Enemies will start flashing once they reach 1 hit point, so you can better pace your shots.

-Some sound feedback for when you get double score for defeating an enemy.

 

While I'm currently squeezing bytes from a stone to get the last few features in (and I'll see how much data I'll have left after I get the levels in - I've currently allocated the maximum amount of data space for them, and *hopefully* I won't be using all of it), after reorganizing I actually have a some graphical space left to play with, which has made me get some more ideas for some backgrounds.  Making an 8-bit cart wouldn't feel right without *some* palette swapping and tile re-use, but I *should* be able to add in some little details here and there for the parallax levels.

 

DragonsHavocFloatingIsland.thumb.png.ccde476879d0b25d53cb901a339c595a.png

 

I'm doing a lot for the "full" game, but I'll see if I can release another "demo" with some of the above features included soon, and see what people think.

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What I've played so far was fantastic. While it took some getting used to, I felt the rage mechanic worked well. But the graphics, my god the graphics look great!  I was floored by the (what I believe is) parallax scrolling!  I cant wait to get your finished product!  Not to gush but out of all the works in progress this is one of my personal most wanted!  Thanks for the update!

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Posting a few more little teasers...I reorganized the graphics banks, freeing up a touch more space for the title screen tiles - the columns can be a little more detailed, on par with Dragon's Cache. 

 

DragonsHavocNewerTitleScreen.thumb.png.a9bbb58dfaa236a06212fcb67434450b.png

 

I'm working on pixel art - trying to get backgrounds and level tiles finalized, which has of course uncovered a few bugs.  I'm planning on updating my bitmap-to-text array script I wrote so I can output tiles and enemy locations at the same time, and finally get my level sketches into the game!

 

I have no idea why I enjoy the frustration of musical composition with the TIA, but I do, even as I curse my tin ears and the TIA's tinnier sounds.  I have a pool of tunes that I've finished, it's just a matter of picking the ones that will be in the final build.  

 

14ish different enemy behaviors across 7ish enemy types.  Easy to edit, which can make it hard to finish (see the concluding paragraph).

 

7 Levels, each with 3 sections - Parallax stage, Tile Stage, and Boss.  Fairly easy to edit, which means it can be hard to finish (again, see the concluding  paragraph)

 

As I said earlier - I've been shifting from my brain from programmer to designer and artist, which I often find more fun but also more frustrating.  In programming, you can finish a feature (usually...) while in art and design, you have to tell yourself that you can stop, the design is good enough, or be stuck staring at a blank canvas waiting for a good idea.  Not to say writer's block and perfectionism aren't issues in coding, but you often have more quantitative and objective measures to look at.  You can *know* when your code is smaller than 48K of ROM and compiles, but you'll never *really* know if that background you've finished could have been just a *bit* more awesome...

 

 

 

Edited by Revontuli
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Today, I managed to get drafts of the major tile map graphics, along with their tentative color palettes.  I've penciled in the enemy colors for the tile levels as well, although I want to see how much contrast I want, and it's a fine line between contrast and clash (and is clash *really* a big deal on an 8-bit game? :))

 

DragonsHavocCaves.thumb.png.91bbf621f5382ed122061bdf81b57859.png

 

I've got a theme for 6 out of the 7 parallax maps as well, but those will need some more adjustments, layout, and color balancing.  Plus I still have some free graphical space to add more detail to the parallax backgrounds, but I'll see if I'll need those for that last undetermined level. 

 

So...actually a lot done - the investment of lot of programming and even more downtime thinking about graphical themes and designs kind of ended up clicking today, although I'll see how I look at all of this once I come back with fresh eyes tomorrow.  

 

 

 

 

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A little update - finally settled on a theme for my last outstanding parallax level and have it animating.  All the backgrounds need a little work - that's the main reason I haven't been posting more pics (that and spoilers), but after shuffling around some graphics, I found I have 4ish unused 16x16 regions (or 8ish 8x16 tiles), basically benchmarked for adding detail to parallax backgrounds.  I'll be deliberating the best ways and places to use them. 

 

I also finally removed the music tracks I wasn't using, which also freed up some space in code ROM, so I have a *little* more space than I thought - not much, and I probably should save most of it for potential bug fixes, but I want to get the rest of the game (including a rough draft of the full levels and bosses) "penciled in" before I try expanding anything.

 

My mind is also racing with other ideas for new games given what I've learned, but I'm deliberately focusing on getting this one done before jumping into anything new.  Given all that, I should also try to get a new demo posted, mainly to see how the subtle new features I mentioned a few posts ago play out.  

 

While I'm keeping a lot of screenshots close to my chest, I'll post the bitmap I used to generate the tile level in the demo:

 

DragonsHavocDemoLevelCave.png.418d0d55208a2ce0388451d97a3d1c0a.png

 

I think I mentioned earlier that I wrote a script that reads in bitmap data and outputs byte data readable by 7800Basic, so I can paint level layouts in a graphics editor.  I'm revising it to be a little more streamlined (currently I generate the enemy and block data in two separate passes - I can merge the two, now that I have a mostly complete bestiary and know how much data each element entails). 

 

Since this *is* a programming thread, I'll try and compile some more notes on how I handle the data, code, etc. if anyone is interested.  One short answer for a lot of things is that I try to keep things simple and being aware of the 7800's comfort zone - debugging code is twice as hard as writing it, so if one programs as cleverly as possible, they *by definition* cannot debug their own code :) 

 

TL;DR more graphical progress and a hope to post an updated demo build soon!

Edited by Revontuli
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Slight update to the demo build:

 

DragonsHavoc_2_4Demo_2022.bas.a78

 

DragonsHavocDemoDesert.thumb.png.7eb11520d931376cf0a4b9012772ad6d.png

 

Looking at the demo I posted last year, I realized how many changes I've made since then that hopefully improve the game's feedback.  While I've been working on the full game, I'm posting a new version of the demo with some of the features I listed above:

 

-Enemies flash when at 1 hit point, so you can pace your shots better

-Rage Meter visuals revised a little - you can see how much more you need to fill it.

-Different sound effect when getting double score

-Still adjusting the rate you increase/decrease rage, as well various enemy hit points.

 

The high score doesn't save at the moment - I just turned off AtariVox/Savekey support for the demo, since the code can play odd with emulators.  Plus, this early on, scoring for the game will likely change and shouldn't be saved anyway!

 

I've seen too many people who don't intuit the rage mechanic and who play just holding down the fire button - that's like racing a car with the parking break on and in 2nd gear :P - I hope to make this occurrence more rare... 

I'm hoping to do some level design that hints that "hitting stuff = faster/missing stuff = slower" and I hope the rage meter's presence allows folks to grok the dynamic.  Folks also seem to miss the instructions that are in rotation during attract mode - and I don't quite have the heart yet to make that screen the first folks see when they power on the game.

 

<Tiny petty game design rant>

A few little things that bug me - a lot more than they probably should :)

 

One of my pet peeves is having buttons you don't have a reason to *not* press.  If the game works as well (or better) with some masking tape holding down a button, I should do something else with that input.  I feel a lot of shmups, even really good ones that I love, are guilty of this, and I'm hoping this gives an interesting twist to powering up. 

 

Another pet peeve is scoring systems that don't use the ones or tens digit, so I try to have *something* in my games that at least gives, say, one point, or 7 points, or even 25 points - drawing text and numbers takes enough cycles and space as it is!

</Tiny petty game design rant>

 

Thank all of you following this thread - I said I'd have *something* playable posted soon, and I mean to keep working on the full game and get that testable as soon as I can.

 

That said, the core loop is something I want to lock in as I flesh out the rest of the levels in the game - so any feedback is welcome!

 

Edited by Revontuli
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9 hours ago, Revontuli said:

<Tiny petty game design rant>

A few little things that bug me - a lot more than they probably should :)

 

One of my pet peeves is having buttons you don't have a reason to *not* press.  If the game works as well (or better) with some masking tape holding down a button, I should do something else with that input.  I feel a lot of shmups, even really good ones that I love, are guilty of this, and I'm hoping this gives an interesting twist to powering up. 

 

Another pet peeve is scoring systems that don't use the ones or tens digit, so I try to have *something* in my games that at least gives, say, one point, or 7 points, or even 25 points - drawing text and numbers takes enough cycles and space as it is!

</Tiny petty game design rant>

 

Fully agree with both.

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This game is shaping up fantastically. I'm eagerly looking forward to it! One little nit visually, if you don't mind. I noticed that in one of the videos (the one with the amazing depth!), the blue sprite gets a bit lost with blue backgrounds, or at least it looks that way watching it on my laptop. Is that something you've noticed in actually playing it? Have you considered/is it even possible to make the sprite stand out a bit more? I'm recalling like in Dragon Spirit, which also has a blue dragon, its hue was a different shade of blue than the water, so there is no difficulty in discernment when you get blue on blue.

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39 minutes ago, Rhomaios said:

This game is shaping up fantastically. I'm eagerly looking forward to it! One little nit visually, if you don't mind. I noticed that in one of the videos (the one with the amazing depth!), the blue sprite gets a bit lost with blue backgrounds, or at least it looks that way watching it on my laptop. Is that something you've noticed in actually playing it? Have you considered/is it even possible to make the sprite stand out a bit more? I'm recalling like in Dragon Spirit, which also has a blue dragon, its hue was a different shade of blue than the water, so there is no difficulty in discernment when you get blue on blue.

I'm trying to avoid having the backgrounds be the exact same color as the red and blue dragons - in addition, I'm color cycling to the sprite, ramping from near black to near white, which should help differentiate the player from the background about.  This is something I've been thinking about a lot - on top of trying to manage it with differences between NTSC (Never The Same Color) and modern displays.  I'll also have to see how people track the dragons while playing.  

 

I think the example you're referring to is the crystal cave one - I'm going to adjust the colors on that one a bit, but the captured gif is also at an odd framerate and didn't capture much of the color cycling, so for all the depth the dragon itself looks a bit flatter that it probably would be during gameplay.

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13 minutes ago, Revontuli said:

I'm trying to avoid having the backgrounds be the exact same color as the red and blue dragons - in addition, I'm color cycling to the sprite, ramping from near black to near white, which should help differentiate the player from the background about.  This is something I've been thinking about a lot - on top of trying to manage it with differences between NTSC (Never The Same Color) and modern displays.  I'll also have to see how people track the dragons while playing.  

 

I think the example you're referring to is the crystal cave one - I'm going to adjust the colors on that one a bit, but the captured gif is also at an odd framerate and didn't capture much of the color cycling, so for all the depth the dragon itself looks a bit flatter that it probably would be during gameplay.

 

Glad to hear it! Yeah, don't get me wrong, I really like that cave. This is all very impressive, but that's the one thing that immediately stood out to me. Thanks for the response and for the game!

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I've been working on the cave levels, and have rough drafts for all 7.  The parallax backgrounds are all in a "rough draft" phase as well - The themes are defined, and I've the tiles allotted to each, but now I'm figuring out where to place them (it's like Lego for backdrops).  I hopefully have most of the actual pixel art for the graphical blocks worked out (with one single 8x16 block for the backgrounds still not used yet - I'll see where it'll be needed...)  

 

Next step is to draft the enemy placement in the parallax levels, then boss screens, and then see how much space I have left. 

 

In terms of public release, once I'm ready I'm thinking of releasing another demo with the first few levels, and see how people respond to the controls, difficulty progression, etc.  

 

I'll post another teaser - cropped mainly because, as I mentioned, I'm still laying out where the tiles go, (as well as still experimenting with colors for the enemies and backgrounds), but here's a hint of another stage in development:

 

650467527_ForestTeaser.png.30a62c3c38ac44b3ff87f2bd6a1f6288.png

Edited by Revontuli
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