The (in)activity of last 3 years and Arkanoid WIP video

Hi There,

I'm really sorry for the very long delay in updating this blog. Last years I was very busy with my real life job. I released stuff in slower rate as well.

My releases as coder or graphician...

• Sgt. Helmet Zero - design and code and graphics by me, a ZX Spectrum conversion.
• Memento - a memory game of Skoro; design and graphics by me.
• Ghost Town - an old game recolored.
• Warrior of RAS Volume I - a Commodore 64 game converted to Commodore Plus/4
• Android 2 - another C64 game went to Plus/4
• Xplode Man - a Bomberman clone by Skoro; design and graphics by me.
• Pac-Pac - a Pacman clone by Skoro; design and graphics by me.
• Crackers' Demo V - I made a playable Arkanoid part into this demo. It is based on the original arcade version.

The AIT2 project is not abandoned. It's just a too large project for one coder/graphician, and it overwhelmed me so I put it aside for a while (ahem, 3 years...)

These days I started to develop a full version of Arkanoid. The demo version contains all 32 rounds with the full feature set (pickable bonuses, enemies, shooting, explosions, etc.) and the endgame boss in a simple animation on ending screen. The full game will feature these as well:

• Last round with boss battle. You have to hit Doh 16 times to destroy while trying to avoid its bullets.
• Scoring
• Hiscore
• Two players mode (if possible, perhaps I will run out of memory...)

Current state of last battle in a short video

Hi!

Here's another proof that I worked on AIT2 in last 4 months (in silence). I made various "engines" for different tasks: one of these is the Objects (or Actors, nevermind) engine which handles all kind of objects in a room: the switch, the pushable crates, and from now: turrets and bullets!

The turrets are - in fact - invisible objects which only spawn bullets in given position and direction. Those visible turrets built in the wall (lower video) are simple graphic elements of background.

Each turret has various properties in room definition: speed, shooting pattern (explain soon), shooting direction and bullet type.

Each shooting pattern is a byte (8 bits we know) and the turret rotates this pattern byte bitwise by a determined speed. 1 bit means "shoot" and 0 bit means "wait" in this pattern. So how it works:

For example, turret speed: 10, shooting pattern: "01100101".
1. The turret waits 10 times.
2. The turret checks bit #0, now that's "1". That means "shoot", so the AI of turret spawns a bullet and puts into the object list.
3. Rotate this pattern 1bit to the left, now the pattern is "10110010".
4. The turret waits another 10 times.
5. The turret check bit #0, now it's "0" so the turret does nothing.
6. Go back to step 1.

The bullets are really simple things. After they were created start moving to a given direction (not only left or right but up and down directions are also possible) until they collide with a wall then they disappear (future plans: instead of simple disappearing perhaps some kind of explosion, smoke, etc?)

Two new features

Hi,

I finally finished the implementations of two features: slideable objects and switches (only from ON to OFF direction). I made a short video which show these two features.

I'm still experiencing YouTube video uploading features, this time I learnt putting annotations on video :)

Another video of gameplay

Hi,

I made another video from a different world. Let's go medieval! :) The gameplay currently lacks enemies, swithes + doors, spikes can't hurt you and so on.

This time I tried to improve the video quality.

Early gameplay video

Hi,

In last months I worked on AIT2 on and off. I made a short video of current state. You can watch it here:

I made this level for testing purposes (but its graphics will be used in final version, or else it'd be a waste).
A short feature list you can see in the clip:
- A butterfly for eyecandy (tests sprite-sprite collision, sprite-gamearea collision)
- Two tile types which slide you left/right - like when you stand on a conveyor belt. You can see it on very first room.
- Rotating coins as collectible items - it disappears from game world, won't reappear again when you enter the same room again.
- Hidden passages.
- Jumper platforms which make you jump higher.

Weekend coding

Last weekend I did some coding. I wanted to develop an initial version of avatar control and movement: walking, jumping, falling. And a basic collision detection with the walls.

First I made a prototype in C# using only byte and word types only. When this algorythm functioned well, I converted to assembly code.

Current features of this control system:
- builtin interia system: when player start to walk left, it starts at low speed and gets faster and faster, etc.
- jumping at variable height.

I took a short videoclip about this feature:

Video uploading issues

It will be a short post, I just want to share my first experiments with video uploading.

Originally I wanted to post a short video in this post.
First, I made very WIP version of the sprite engine. I wanted to show you it in motion, so I made a video (AVI) of it in YAPE emulator. Blogger has a feature: embed video which is uploaded to YouTube. "Fine, I have google account, I have YouTube account, they are linked, it will be piece of cake." I'm so naive :) Pressing "upload video" button on YouTube bring me a new page: "Create a channel! You can't upload videos if you don't have a channel." Hmm, still ok, let's continue. Next page: enter e-mail, id, all kind of data for a new "some-kind-of-account". WTF? Why do I need to have 3! different accounts for uploading a fukin' video??? No way YouTube, thanx anyway.

So, no video for ya this time...Instead of it you can see a screenshot with 8 pieces of 16x16px sprites, which are move, rotate, overlap text and other sprites. Believe me :)

Update: I could manage to upload my video directly into the blog, skipping YouTube.

The flashing on the border means various techy things about the doublebuffering and how fast (slow) the engine is...