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Space Invaders - WIP


Preppie

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1 hour ago, Preppie said:

Well, that's no fun :)

 

I've seen the 7800 version on youtube, and I'm sure I'll grab a couple of ideas from it, but the main reason I'm doing this is to teach myself assembler.

That's exactly why I didn't post it until now; and I knew you were getting code examples from the original (or at least general ideas about the game's inner workings/structure).

 

Edited by MrFish
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7 hours ago, MrFish said:

That's exactly why I didn't post it until now; and I knew you were getting code examples from the original (or at least general ideas about the game's inner workings/structure).

 

Mr. Fish is doing things the same way I do... cool beans!  It's a good thing not giving the answer and then showing stuff afterwards. A much better understanding an appreciation is had in this way. Truly learned and not forgotten and lots of fun.

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21 minutes ago, Preppie said:

Very nice, but stop trying to give me more work to do lol

Haha..."Work"?... this is fun, man. ;) 

 

Interestingly, a thread was opened up on Thursday showing the beginnings of a Space Invaders Arcade game for the 2600 by Thomas Jentzsch. I stumbled upon it while doing some web searches when I was putting this latest idea together.

 

Space Invaders Arcade (2600) - WIP

 

Edited by MrFish
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48 minutes ago, MrFish said:

Interestingly, a thread was opened up on Thursday showing the beginnings of a Space Invaders Arcade game for the 2600 by Thomas Jentzsch. I stumbled upon it while doing some web searches when I was putting this latest idea together.

 

Space Invaders Arcade (2600) - WIP

 

Post #44 ?

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1 hour ago, Jason1024 said:

Wow, this looks great--wish my first assembler project was half as good. If you're open to such things, +1 vote for a 'classic' mode which looks/plays/sounds as close to the original (arguably crappy) arcade experience as possible.

My initial aim is to recreate the arcade machine on the Atari 800 as closely as possible.  After that, I'd like to throw in a few bonus modes.

 

The great thing about asembler is you're just playing around with bytes.  I changed gr.8 to gr.15 and it still plays the same (with garbled graphics), so all I need to do to get those nice graphics from MrFish is do a new graphic set, and maybe adjust collision detection a bit.

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Is it done yet? lol

 

I know you're only joking but just want to point out for those who missed it in the initial post, I've got a lot of work on atm so won't get any coding done for another week or so. 

 

How long's it going to take once I get back to it?   Hard to say, will depend on work&life commitments and how much I want to do with the game options, and if I have any trouble with the actual code.

 

It could take a month, it could take 6 month, but I'm hoping to at least have a playable alpha before the end of July.

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It deffo was a joke and genuinely it's done when its done, we just appreciate the fact you are taking your own time to make the game, especially in these mad times.

 

Don't even try to give any timescales, life and those commitments always come first, life can be plain sailing or change in a millisecond, trust me, I know that as much as many..

 

 

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It's always great to see a programmer starting out on their journey - wanting to work on arcade game projects.

 

It is too late to make any significant change in the graphics department.  But when you start your next project - you could think about how might the graphics be effectively done?

What possible enhancement can you add - instead of it - just being 'standard'.

 

Like - extra frames of animation?  extra animation being present.

Doing a nice explosion - that is used a lot in the game.

Doing a nice - player dies animation.

 

Adding any extra animation?  Like for when you advance a level.

For when you complete a level?

 

If you're not up to designing the graphics yourself - I'm sure there'll be some keen graphics guys (or gals) wanting to volunteer their time on it.

4 frames minimum is nice.   8 frames for smoother.

 

Like explosions/player dies can have more than 8 frames maybe.

 

And if you have a game that you can cycle through many times - it's possible to have a varying animation for each time you make it through the whole game.  Or add in some changes for later on.

 

Anyway - good luck with your project - and looking forward to it's completion.

 

Harvey

 

(worked on graphics for - Laser Hawk, HawkQuest, Blowsub, Strictly Gone Bananas,  AtariBlast! Scramble)

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On 6/15/2020 at 2:03 PM, Preppie said:

.

It could take a month, it could take 6 month, but I'm hoping to at least have a playable alpha before the end of July.

 

Take your time man, you have done great work so far !

Here is my idea for an animated gun, just for fun  :) 

 

  3.gif.26cb3ad284387f4ad8f48ae2cfd80956.gif

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  • 2 weeks later...

OK, just thought I'd have a cider or two and ramble a bit about what's going on.

 

My initial plan was to write Space Invaders totally with FastBasic in Antic mode 4.  After studying the game a little I realised I'd need assembler for the missiles, so that was plan 'A' = as much done with FastBasic and the missiles in assembler.

 

Plan 'A' = I wrote the Invaders codes and it was working great, but when I added the player tank I started to skip frames.  This was not because of FB lacking speed, but my poor coding logic.  So I had to rewrite the code, or I could just dive in and do the main game fully in assembler.

 

Plan 'B' = I'm doing the main game loop in assembler with all the intro screens and initialization in FB.  Everything was working fine but I got sick of the hassle of assembler so a few days back I wrote the intro screens in FB - worked great.  Now back to assembler and it's a pain, the way I'm working is fine for small bits of code but a pain now that I need to start tweeking a larger program split into 6 chunks. Time for a new plan...

 

Plan 'C' = I'd written the assembler in chunks, the main gameloop in FB was basically 6 USR calls to the individual assembler bits, fine tuning them with my current system was getting painfully slow.  So, I downloaded WUSDN and spent the last 2 days transferring everything over.  No FastBasic anymore, I'm doing it all in assembler.

 

I just want to give two pieces of advice to anyone wanting to start a project in assembler.  First, do it - assembler really isn't as difficult as you may think.  Second - for the love of God! put comments in your code.  Debugging 2000 lines of assembler without a single comment is not fun.


As for the game itself, it's coming along nicely.  Everything is in place (invaders, missiles, player, saucer, scoring).  There's adjustments and tweeking to be done, and I need to add code for a 2nd player, but everything is working as expected - should definitly have a beta out before the end of the month.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Ok, real life got in the way and haven't had time to get that beta sorted :(

 

Sorry to anyone waiting for this but I'm gonna put it on hold for 2 months as I'd like to get a game made for ABBUC.  It's seriously touch and go whether I can do something in 2 months but guys do game jams in 48hrs these days so how hard could it be? lol

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22 minutes ago, shanti77 said:

You have a month for ABBUC.

Says 26th September here 

 

But on the link it says 26th August :(

 

Damnit, a game in a month.  Well, we'll see what happens :)  If I can't do it (almost certain) I'll go back and finish invaders then go back to the failed ABBUC entry.

 

 

 

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40 minutes ago, Preppie said:

Says 26th September here 

 

But on the link it says 26th August :(

 

Damnit, a game in a month.  Well, we'll see what happens :)  If I can't do it (almost certain) I'll go back and finish invaders then go back to the failed ABBUC entry.

 

 

 

Holger corrected himsel:

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/304677-abbuc-software-competition-2020/?do=findComment&comment=4498520

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  • 1 year later...

I did a Sprite Hack of Space Invaders for the 2600. I wanted to try out some of my ideas for 160 mode sprites. What I ended up with is what I think has the best balance in terms of arcade look and playability (sprite size). There are hard limitations on what can be done with sprites in the 2600 version, though. The barriers, player ship, and saucer are only 8 pixels wide -- which all would be more arcade-like otherwise (as in my mockup for the 8-bit version posted here above). The 8 pixel limit for enemies is no problem, though; as they don't need to be wider.

 

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