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Sprite to sprite collisions are a-okay! The cars react according to where they have been hit from and, whilst i need to add another check for differing speeds, there’s more of a racing feel to the game.

Position checking is done with 2 well-timed comparison tests and works well, I doubt I’ll add a qualifying section to this game as passing opponents should be the main focus of this game.

But, I still have to sort out background collisions still, gyahhh! Nahh, it’ll be fine, just gotta hope I don’t exceed the CPU limits, collision detection takes surprisingly little!

After a brief check on the space left in the bank, I’ve got a little over 5kb of ROM to spare. Not much, but hopefully, enough, most of the functions can be contained in their own bank which will free up a fair amount so there is some wiggle room to play with.

As always, screenshot for you down below…

Yay! Tonight I’ve come up with a safe, low CPU way to pseudo randomnly generate CPU cars that will at least initially appear on the track. That’s basically it to be honest but they attempt to home in on your car and have their own travelling speed, they also persist for a while once they go off the screen, should you, the player make an error shortly after the overtake, they can pass you back.

I guess next up, they should have differing speeds (easy to do) so they can get harder or easier depending on your position (still gotta calculate that!)

Still, it’s had more progress each night so, let’s celebrate with an animated GIF! It looped rather well!

The course needs simplifying down and lengthening out also, but I have a lot of space left in ROM ~8k for more track details, sound and, well, a lot of this data / functions can be stored inside a separate bank, because I’ll be bank switching a lot I imagine!

I got way more into customising the colour palettes today, found out a way to set each background tile to have a certain palette index on both bkg and window layers and it’s looking pretty cool!

Sure seems to take up CPU with how I’m doing it though, when a new scroll line evnt is triggered, the colour changes add a lot to the CPU usage, which isn’t great. The gameboy colour does have a fast mode which might mitigate some of this issue but I do need to find a safe way to determine which hardware I’m running on so I can avoid running unnecessary code for greyscale gameboys.

Anyhoo, it’s looking prettier, still controls the same and collision ‘n’ enemies need to be added / updated, but that’s the coming weeks target.

Wheee racing games huzzah! I’ll have something ready for the end of this month I reckon. Just not sure how complete it’ll be. March brings me back to finally finishing off They Are Everywhere.