Rob 'n' Banks: Weekly Development Log

[+Ryan Witmer]

15 hours ago, TIX said:

 

The Super D policemen are named Stiffy, Scaredy, Smarty, and Silly.

The cops will have names, but not those names.  I already know what they are, but you'll have to wait until I make the title screen.

[+Ryan Witmer]

Really wasn't feeling it this weekend, but I was determined to at least get something done.

 

I added the proper delays to the cops initial movement.  In the arcade game, the red cop starts moving as soon as the door closes behind the player when entering the bank, then the others start a little later.  This is now in place, but the timing still needs some work.

 

I also added a system for controlling the speeds of both the cops and the player.  The cops are now slower than the player, but I can change this speed whenever I want.  I'm pretty sure they get faster on later stages and if you take too long on the current stage.  I can also change the speed of the player.  I'll need to do some research to see if the player gets faster on later stages, but I'm betting he does.

 

Next I plan to get the cops to respect the green gates and the player doors.  I'm not actually doing that this weekend, but I'm spending a lot of time thinking about it and I might have an idea in mind.

[+Ryan Witmer]

After a few bumps in the road I got the cops to respect the doors and green gates.  They bounce off of them and then just run right into them again because they're dumb, but at least they can't just walk right through them.

 

I think I'm going to aim to put together a playable "dumb cop" demo in the next couple of weeks.  Here's a short checklist of everything I think I need to do for this:

 

• Allow the cops to catch the player
• Detect when a cop is trapped in the corner and award bonus points
• Add some more bonus objects so there's some sense of level progression
• Clean up the stage exit sequence
• Don't allow the player to close a door on top of a cop.  This is important.
• Add a lives counter for the player and detect game over
• Niceties like start/pause/reset.  Maybe a simple title screen
• Award a bonus life at 15,000 points like the arcade game does

That seems to be the most important stuff, might be a few little things here and there I'm forgetting.  Next week I'll start banging at this list and we'll see how long it takes to get something playable.

[BIGHMW]

19 minutes ago, Ryan Witmer said:

After a few bumps in the road I got the cops to respect the doors and green gates.  They bounce off of them and then just run right into them again because they're dumb, but at least they can't just walk right through them.

 

I think I'm going to aim to put together a playable "dumb cop" demo in the next couple of weeks.  Here's a short checklist of everything I think I need to do for this:

 

• Allow the cops to catch the player
• Detect when a cop is trapped in the corner and award bonus points
• Add some more bonus objects so there's some sense of level progression
• Clean up the stage exit sequence
• Don't allow the player to close a door on top of a cop.  This is important.
• Add a lives counter for the player and detect game over
• Niceties like start/pause/reset.  Maybe a simple title screen
• Award a bonus life at 15,000 points like the arcade game does

That seems to be the most important stuff, might be a few little things here and there I'm forgetting.  Next week I'll start banging at this list and we'll see how long it takes to get something playable.

Don't forget the audio too, very important as most of us use it as an indication of the whereabouts of bonus objects, money bags, coins picked up and player deaths. I love how this is going, it's coming along nicely, great job @Ryan Witmer!!!

[+Ryan Witmer]

Got some good stuff done today and made a little video talking about it and showing a few things off:

 

 

To sum up what's in the video:

 

The game now detects when the cops have caught the player, but it doesn't actually do anything when that happens.  Still, the code is there, and the game correctly ignores it when the cops are in their brief angry state when you grab a cashbag.  Once I get the player death animation in place, I'll finish this part of the game.

 

I also cleaned up the bank exit sequence, and it pretty much matches what the arcade game does.  The cops get mad and your hero does the happy dance once he gets outside.  I think the arcade game closes the door behind you but I have no vertical space left to use so I can't really do that.

 

Not really something you can see, but I did a bunch of code reorganization to make a lot of this stuff easier to do.  I might do a little more this weekend, not really sure.  Either way, pushing closer to a playable build.

[+Ryan Witmer]

Doing my taxes this weekend, so not much time to work on this.  I did manage to squeak in the pause and reset buttons, so those work now.  Might try to get some stuff done tomorrow, but not sure if I'll have time.

[phuzaxeman]

On 2/14/2022 at 3:51 PM, Ryan Witmer said:

The cops will have names, but not those names.  I already know what they are, but you'll have to wait until I make the title screen.

Ryan, is there anyway to have the cops share the same color uniform but have different color faces like the arcade?  Everything looks great btw. 

[+Ryan Witmer]

On 3/13/2022 at 4:11 PM, phuzaxeman said:

Ryan, is there anyway to have the cops share the same color uniform but have different color faces like the arcade?

Unfortunately, not really.  This has a lot of the same problems that Intellidiscs did, where it's hard to do a lot of color stuff when everything can appear on the same horizontal line.  I have enough time to color one object, and I'm saving screen time for the two-player cooperative mode which I'm still not sure will actually work.

 

Knocked some great stuff out today, specifically detecting when the cops are trapped in the corners and awarding the correct number of points.

 

 

Let's take a look at my "first playable build" checklist:

 

On 2/27/2022 at 4:27 PM, Ryan Witmer said:

• Allow the cops to catch the player (Partial, this is detected but nothing happens)
• Detect when a cop is trapped in the corner and award bonus points
• Add some more bonus objects so there's some sense of level progression
• Clean up the stage exit sequence
• Don't allow the player to close a door on top of a cop.  This is important.
• Add a lives counter for the player and detect game over
• Niceties like start/pause/reset.  Maybe a simple title screen
• Award a bonus life at 15,000 points like the arcade game does

I might be able to knock out a couple more things tomorrow.  I might have jury duty next week, so finding time to work on this might be tough for a bit.  Need to see what happens.

[+Ryan Witmer]

I've been poking at this a bit throughout the week and got a few things done.

Seemed like a good idea to update the checklist.

 

• Allow the cops to catch the player (Partial, this is detected but nothing happens)
• Detect when a cop is trapped in the corner and award bonus points
• Add some more bonus objects so there's some sense of level progression
• Clean up the stage exit sequence
• Don't allow the player to close a door on top of a cop.  This is important.
• Add a lives counter for the player and detect game over
• Niceties like start/pause/reset.  Maybe a simple title screen
• Award a bonus life at 15,000 points like the arcade game does

Getting close, might even be possible to have the "first playable, dumb cop" release ready this weekend.

[+Ryan Witmer]

OK, here's "dumb cop test 1" with a whole lot of caveats:

 

I just tried this on real hardware and there are some obvious problems.  Lots of stuttering and slowdown, it looks like I'm trying to do much every frame.  I probably need to split the cop logic so I don't try to deal with all of them every frame.  So if you see performance issues, yeah I already know about those.  This also makes me wonder if the two player co-op mode is actually a realistic goal.

 

The cops are dumb, real dumb.  They all have the same behavior and just march straight toward you.  They don't change in any way from stage to stage because I know I need to completely rewrite this logic and I didn't want to do throwaway work.  It's really not much of a game.

 

There's a lives counter in the bottom right of the maze.  For the moment, it's a just a number.  I'll come up with something fancier later.  You get three lives.  Right now there's no death animation, just a pause where the animation should be.  Lose all three lives and its back to the title.  Bonus life at 15,000 points.

 

The first four bonus objects are in place, the hat, crown, briefcase, and phone.  I don't have graphics for the remaining objects yet, all stages past four just keep using the phone.  Before you report it, the phone's score value is NOT a bug.  The bonus object scores don't keep going up like in Pacman.  For some reason, the phone is only worth 100 points.

 

The door-cop interactions are still not 100% to my liking.  Need some more work here.

 

Still no sound, getting there, be patient.

 

Be on the look out for a few bugs.  I had some odd things happen during development and I think I fixed them, but I'm not quite sure.

 

The first problem was the cops not erasing properly after you died, and you would sometimes get a couple weird floating pixels.  I'm about 90% sure this has been fixed.

 

The other bugs are bit more interesting.  There's something that will just turn all of the blue parts of the maze black, and something else that just causes the whole game to go haywire.  I can't really describe this last one, but you'll know it if you see it.  I did some work that might have fixed these and I actually think they're two different manifestations of the same problem.  I was never able to consistently reproduce them, so I'm not sure if they're fixed.  I also once saw a score bug where coins were being added to the wrong digit in the score display, so you would get like 2,000 points for every coin.  I only ever saw this once, and it might also be related to the other two.

 

Anyway, with all that in mind, here's dumb cop build 1.  Bugs aside, this has just about all of the game features and just needs a whole lot of polish.

robnbanks.bin

[BIGHMW]

I'll be the first to weigh in on this one, I love how this game is slowly, but surely progressing along nicely, indeed this is already a must-have on your Atarimax and I can't wait to see both the player death sequence as well as a proper secondary title screen (maybe one inspired by the one from the Arcade Lock n' Chase itself) to go along with Ryan's trademark "Phaser Cat Games" beginning screen, as well as a "GAME OVER" tag when you run out of lives, and of course, the audio, to go along with the already-great graphics. Well done, she indeed plays well, and, unlike most 4-directional games on Big Sexy, pretty good control too, although you still do have to be spot-on with the analog joystick, and with my 7800 Redemption and a CX24, she plays even better.

[SoundGammon]

4 hours ago, Ryan Witmer said:

OK, here's "dumb cop test 1" with a whole lot of caveats:

 

I just tried this on real hardware and there are some obvious problems.  Lots of stuttering and slowdown, it looks like I'm trying to do much every frame.  I probably need to split the cop logic so I don't try to deal with all of them every frame.  So if you see performance issues, yeah I already know about those.  This also makes me wonder if the two player co-op mode is actually a realistic goal.

 

The cops are dumb, real dumb.  They all have the same behavior and just march straight toward you.  They don't change in any way from stage to stage because I know I need to completely rewrite this logic and I didn't want to do throwaway work.  It's really not much of a game.

 

There's a lives counter in the bottom right of the maze.  For the moment, it's a just a number.  I'll come up with something fancier later.  You get three lives.  Right now there's no death animation, just a pause where the animation should be.  Lose all three lives and its back to the title.  Bonus life at 15,000 points.

 

The first four bonus objects are in place, the hat, crown, briefcase, and phone.  I don't have graphics for the remaining objects yet, all stages past four just keep using the phone.  Before you report it, the phone's score value is NOT a bug.  The bonus object scores don't keep going up like in Pacman.  For some reason, the phone is only worth 100 points.

 

The door-cop interactions are still not 100% to my liking.  Need some more work here.

 

Still no sound, getting there, be patient.

 

Be on the look out for a few bugs.  I had some odd things happen during development and I think I fixed them, but I'm not quite sure.

 

The first problem was the cops not erasing properly after you died, and you would sometimes get a couple weird floating pixels.  I'm about 90% sure this has been fixed.

 

The other bugs are bit more interesting.  There's something that will just turn all of the blue parts of the maze black, and something else that just causes the whole game to go haywire.  I can't really describe this last one, but you'll know it if you see it.  I did some work that might have fixed these and I actually think they're two different manifestations of the same problem.  I was never able to consistently reproduce them, so I'm not sure if they're fixed.  I also once saw a score bug where coins were being added to the wrong digit in the score display, so you would get like 2,000 points for every coin.  I only ever saw this once, and it might also be related to the other two.

 

Anyway, with all that in mind, here's dumb cop build 1.  Bugs aside, this has just about all of the game features and just needs a whole lot of polish.

robnbanks.bin 32 kB · 4 downloads

For the lives counter, how about eye masks like cat burglars wear? Each mask is a life.

[Nik Brisevac]

7 hours ago, Ryan Witmer said:

OK, here's "dumb cop test 1" with a whole lot of caveats:

 

I just tried this on real hardware and there are some obvious problems.  Lots of stuttering and slowdown, it looks like I'm trying to do much every frame.  I probably need to split the cop logic so I don't try to deal with all of them every frame.  So if you see performance issues, yeah I already know about those.  This also makes me wonder if the two player co-op mode is actually a realistic goal.

 

The cops are dumb, real dumb.  They all have the same behavior and just march straight toward you.  They don't change in any way from stage to stage because I know I need to completely rewrite this logic and I didn't want to do throwaway work.  It's really not much of a game.

 

There's a lives counter in the bottom right of the maze.  For the moment, it's a just a number.  I'll come up with something fancier later.  You get three lives.  Right now there's no death animation, just a pause where the animation should be.  Lose all three lives and its back to the title.  Bonus life at 15,000 points.

 

The first four bonus objects are in place, the hat, crown, briefcase, and phone.  I don't have graphics for the remaining objects yet, all stages past four just keep using the phone.  Before you report it, the phone's score value is NOT a bug.  The bonus object scores don't keep going up like in Pacman.  For some reason, the phone is only worth 100 points.

 

The door-cop interactions are still not 100% to my liking.  Need some more work here.

 

Still no sound, getting there, be patient.

 

Be on the look out for a few bugs.  I had some odd things happen during development and I think I fixed them, but I'm not quite sure.

 

The first problem was the cops not erasing properly after you died, and you would sometimes get a couple weird floating pixels.  I'm about 90% sure this has been fixed.

 

The other bugs are bit more interesting.  There's something that will just turn all of the blue parts of the maze black, and something else that just causes the whole game to go haywire.  I can't really describe this last one, but you'll know it if you see it.  I did some work that might have fixed these and I actually think they're two different manifestations of the same problem.  I was never able to consistently reproduce them, so I'm not sure if they're fixed.  I also once saw a score bug where coins were being added to the wrong digit in the score display, so you would get like 2,000 points for every coin.  I only ever saw this once, and it might also be related to the other two.

 

Anyway, with all that in mind, here's dumb cop build 1.  Bugs aside, this has just about all of the game features and just needs a whole lot of polish.

robnbanks.bin 32 kB · 6 downloads

Love it ! Played it on real hardware from eprom and tried a couple of different controllers (quickshot and a homebrew cherry key controller). I did'nt notice any problems with controls or graphics. It is very playable as is :-) Thankyou. 

[BIGHMW]

4 hours ago, Nik Brisevac said:

Love it ! Played it on real hardware from eprom and tried a couple of different controllers (quickshot and a homebrew cherry key controller). I did'nt notice any problems with controls or graphics. It is very playable as is ? Thankyou. 

Agreed. Maybe a slight slowdown in the action but overall she plays just fine. Now all we need is audio to go along with the gameplay at this point, although she isn't quite 100 percent yet.

[+Ryan Witmer]

Did some work on the cops this week.  First off, I split the processing so that I only handle one cop per frame.  This seems to have fixed the performance issues I was seeing but it has introduced a few minor problems I still need to work out.  Might actually work better to do two cops per frame, still need to experiment a bit.

 

I also started working on giving the cops unique behaviors.  I started with the yellow cop, since he apparently is supposed to wander the maze semi-randomly.  Since he has the least intelligence, getting him working first will help me build the tools I need for the other three.  At this point I pretty much have him working, but still have some kinks to work out.

[+Ryan Witmer]

Still working on cop movement.  Fixed some problems, created a few new ones.  This is really tricky, but once I finally get it working I think everything else will be pretty easy.

[+Ryan Witmer]

Here's a slightly better cop build.  Still not great, but lots of subtle improvements and I've written a lot of tools to make things easier.  I've also added the rest of the bonus objects so that's cool too.

 

There are some problems with the cop movement since I switched to only processing one per frame.  You'll probably notice some stuttering when the cops are moving vertically.  I have to do some rewriting of the movement code to fix this.

 

robnbanks.bin

[+Ryan Witmer]

Starting putting a bunch of time into this on Friday and realized that I made some serious design mistakes early on and those problems are getting worse the more I pile on.

 

I've been spending this weekend doing a complete re-write of the movement code, and it's coming along pretty well.  Once I'm done with this, I should be able to get things moving again and push toward making this a real game.

 

Work is starting to wind down on the PC version of Magical Fairy Force, so I'm going to try to spend a lot more time working on this throughout the week.  Hopefully I'll something cool to show next weekend.

[+Ryan Witmer]

Been banging away at this all week, and I'm going to call this alpha 1.  Here's a video going into some of the features and problems with this build:

 

 

To sum up the video: the game is now fully playable.  There are still some performance problems, you'll notice some cop flickering on real hardware and I need to address that.  I've also added one sound effect, I brought one of the door sounds from Intelldiscs in just to get the sound system up and running.  I need to talk to some POKEY experts to get some real sounds put together.

 

So from here on out it's a push to the finish line.  I have a lot of cool little things I want to add, but the gameplay is more or less complete, aside from performance issues and bug-fixes here and there.

 

So here's alpha 1, which might be the last release on this thread.  Once I get closer to the end I'll start up my customary release thread and start posting there.

 

robnbanks.bin

[ALEXANDER]

On 5/8/2022 at 12:54 PM, Ryan Witmer said:

Been banging away at this all week, and I'm going to call this alpha 1.  Here's a video going into some of the features and problems with this build:

 

 

To sum up the video: the game is now fully playable.  There are still some performance problems, you'll notice some cop flickering on real hardware and I need to address that.  I've also added one sound effect, I brought one of the door sounds from Intelldiscs in just to get the sound system up and running.  I need to talk to some POKEY experts to get some real sounds put together.

 

So from here on out it's a push to the finish line.  I have a lot of cool little things I want to add, but the gameplay is more or less complete, aside from performance issues and bug-fixes here and there.

 

So here's alpha 1, which might be the last release on this thread.  Once I get closer to the end I'll start up my customary release thread and start posting there.

 

robnbanks.bin 32 kB · 23 downloads

Awesome Ryan ! Much better than ever. I hope you finish this game. Best wishes !!

 

[phuzaxeman]

Ryan, the alpha1 was good.  The controls and flow seem good too.

I hope to see some arcade sound effects and little music scores plus the car that drives Rob at the beginning sequence.

 

Looking forward to more updates.

[+Ryan Witmer]

Here's some cool stuff I've been working on this week.  I wanted to get away from the actual game part of the game for a bit, so I started putting together the title screen and menus.  I don't have a title logo yet, but I can work on everything else.

 

 

I was inspired by the way that old Japanese arcade games seemed to like putting hearts all over the place, and since there's a heart in the 5200's character set, I figured I'd use it.  I thought it was also very 80s to call the bank robbers heroes, so there you go.

 

 

So here are your four cops, and again, more hearts.  I've brought back the Ratcatcher crew for another adventure.

 

That game only had three players, so I needed to add fourth named Bull.  Pretend it's the bailiff from Night Court for extra laughs.  This also marks the return of Pork-Chop, who keeps showing up in my games for some reason.

 

 

(He's the slow, lazy cop)

 

I've also added little score explanation screens where Rob runs across picking up stuff so you can see how many points you get.

There's also one for the cash bag score sequence.

 

Finally, I have the actual main menu.

 

I've added a stage select like Pac Man has, so you get to start at any of the first ten levels.  The two player mode can be selected from the menu, but it doesn't actually work yet.

 

So yeah, lots of that kind of stuff going on.  Not terribly exciting, but it needs to get done and it's a nice break from the game code.

[BIGHMW]

Just beautiful, Burien's own @Ryan Witmer making Atarians (and especially long-time 5200 owners like me, Port Townsend REPRESENT!!!) throughout the Great Northwest (and elsewhere too let's not forget!) proud!!! WAY 2 GO!!! This would be just fine for my 56th Birthday today!!! Hope to see the next ROM available soon!!!

[phuzaxeman]

On 5/19/2022 at 10:59 PM, Ryan Witmer said:

Here's some cool stuff I've been working on this week.  I wanted to get away from the actual game part of the game for a bit, so I started putting together the title screen and menus.  I don't have a title logo yet, but I can work on everything else.

 

 

I was inspired by the way that old Japanese arcade games seemed to like putting hearts all over the place, and since there's a heart in the 5200's character set, I figured I'd use it.  I thought it was also very 80s to call the bank robbers heroes, so there you go.

 

 

So here are your four cops, and again, more hearts.  I've brought back the Ratcatcher crew for another adventure.

 

That game only had three players, so I needed to add fourth named Bull.  Pretend it's the bailiff from Night Court for extra laughs.  This also marks the return of Pork-Chop, who keeps showing up in my games for some reason.

 

 

(He's the slow, lazy cop)

 

I've also added little score explanation screens where Rob runs across picking up stuff so you can see how many points you get.

There's also one for the cash bag score sequence.

 

Finally, I have the actual main menu.

 

I've added a stage select like Pac Man has, so you get to start at any of the first ten levels.  The two player mode can be selected from the menu, but it doesn't actually work yet.

 

So yeah, lots of that kind of stuff going on.  Not terribly exciting, but it needs to get done and it's a nice break from the game code.

Looks amazing!

[BIGHMW]

Hey @Ryan Witmer,

 

A little idea/suggestion on how to do the title screen for Rob 'N' Banks, use a font that is inspired by (if not close to) the font of "Lock 'N' Chase" on the arcade cabinet, you did a fantastic job on the logo for Intellidiscs when you use the Tron font, and I think you can do this one too in the same way.

 

You know, something like this: