One Game A Month Archives

More Formula Racing Features Added!

Okay, it’s been a while but, yes life, is a thing and it isn’t always coding of course 🙂

Having said that over the weekend just gone I’ve managed to get more of the game ready, including part of the opening sequence which just needs some palette work for the gameboy colour so that’s all in motion.

I’ve set-up the ability to have multiple levels in the game and I reckon I can easily fit a decent number in there, possibly with each one having it’s own variants in both colours and some other elements to break things up a bit.

I’m tempted to learn how to add a border for the super gameboy also, although I’d need to learn some more ASM first in order to figure this out.

Sadly, it looks like I won’t be finished for the February #1gam but, that’s okay, I’ve got more of a workable engine to use across the year for any future gameboy games and that’s pretty neat.

Speaking of engines… Damage is now a factor with your race car. Taking damage impacts acceleration and once the limit is reached, you will explode, lose three places, then respawn. Crashing into the back of another car or off track obstacles is particularly painful!

Cars get tougher to pass the further up the rankings you go and I’m still enjoying playing and making the game so, that’s all good for the moment I think! Now, back to figuring this Super Gameboy out a bit perhaps….

[edit] I shouldn’t have made this border, now it’s a mission! [/edit]

Racing A.I. Squeezed In how much is left?

So, I’ve established some form of racing A.I. which will at least, keep them on the track a lot better and they still perform some homing in on the player, making them particularly tough to pass easily on the test track at least.

Lap counters, speedometers and damage counters are in place and ALL THE BASICS ARE THERE! Which is really nice, but. I’m pretty much maxing out the CPU on the Classic Gameboy, which means there’s not much more I can fit in before things get janky and framerate-y.

Essentially, I’m now really limited to what else I can add to the game without breaking the Gameboy version (the Gameboy colour version is a-okay though, faster CPU (~8MHz) so more time per frame)

Hopefully some power-ups are possible. I’m thinking either boost pads or boost fuel drops in odd places on the track would be pretty cool to force the player off-line.

I **could** drop the game down to 30fps instead of 60 but I don’t really wanna do that. That smells of just giving up on performance, there’s got to be another way around it.

I need to add some toughness to handling the cars also, make the controls a biut more analogue in the steering. That should make things a bit more interesting regarding mastery of the game.

The Lap count is currently going up from 0 and taking up to much window space so It’s going to be changed over to a countdown instead with “L:XX”. With XX being the number of laps remaining.

There’s only a few days left until the end of the month now and #1gam is looming, I’m still hoping to add a few game modes in there though, including a championship mode, time attack, not to mention intro screens, car selector and results summary. Oh and a password system.

I think I’m going to need to cut-back a bit!

More Gameboy screens in Photoshop

Not the most productive day for coding today but, thanks to my sleep pattern being slightly messed up this weekend, I managed to fit a couple of screens of pixel art in tonight / this morning.

The Refresh Games logo needed some Gameboy love and should fit easily into RAM, but, the main title, I’m not so sure about.

Some clever tile mapping will be needed no doubt, I guess that’ll be tomorrows gubbins!

Still, it looks pretty cool there, I used a 3d model of super deformed F1 car I’d made a couple of years ago which just seemed to fit in really nicely when posterized in Photoshop.

We’ll see tomorrow I guess then.

[P.S. most of my tutorial code for part 2 of my GBDK tutorial series is nearly ready also, it just takes a while to write all about it.]