Untitled Bee Game Day 2

Day 2 and we have our first enemy on screen! Launching stingers like it’s going out of fashion!

The wasp enemy zooms on the edges of the screen and can launch (with it’s optional future friends) stingers from a cache of 8 on screen at any one time. Of course, it has a shadow because, hey, I think it looks cool. Yep, those lil bits under the stingers are meant to bee shadows also, I’m not sure how well that’ll work overall but we shall see.

The wasp normally shares it’s sprite colour with player1 but will shift to player2’s sprite colours just before it fires, to give the players at least some sort of a warning.

Maybe tomorrow will bring another update, who knows?

Lets start NES Game#2 Untitled Bee Game!

Right, so, begun the next game, aiming for a simpler game to program this time around, with a few variants on play styles.

It’s gonna be a spin off the QBert style of games where you have to turn all the blocks a certain colour to continue.

In this case, your bee must collect all the pollen from the flowers and returning it to the hive up to 5 at a time, whilst being attacked by Wasp stingers, Birds and Crabs.

It’ll be playable by 1 or 2 players, with there being the option of 2 players playing co-operatively to beat the levels, or against each other in a single level basis, one person controls the bee, the other controls the wasps. (I’m thinking D pad to move them all around, A button firing vertical wasps, B button firing horizontal wasps.

The difficulty curve should some from starting off with slower, fewer wasps, before increasing the number and aggression of them, before introducing more enemies as it goes along.

Below is a pic of the game screen in-progress from inside a NES Emulator, lots to get on with but lots done today!

Finally Done!

All the levels are set, a few unbeatable levels have been fixed up, a few, easier levels have been toughened up and wow, hardest mode is so damn tough!

I played through each level (1,024 of them) and noticed a couple unbeatable levels which, really wouldn’t be suitable to leave in, so some manual overriding of the generator was required. Thankfully, not for many levels. There’s just over 5kb of space remaining and that’s fine, I’ve used up enough space of the 40kb available (well, 32kb as 8kb is reserved for graphics)

I’ve learnt a lot about 6502 ASM, the NES and developed a few techniques over the years making this game. It’s been a tough, emotional, thing to make. Having no experience in ASM code beforehand, aside from a couple days prototyping stuff on the Atari 2600, which I quickly gave up upon, I developed a lot of bad habits and I’m sure that if anyone looked through the code they’d be shocked as to see how this game was coded up.

Looking through it all, I can clearly see where my initial code was and while it’s functional it’s not particularly great / optimized.

I’m going to sort out my generic functions from the rest of the code tonight and roll that into the next game, which I’ve been wanting to start for a fair while now, I mean, I already made a prototype for it on the Gameboy whilst this game was in early development. Whew…It’s been a while.

Nonetheless, I am now a lot closer to crossing off what was probably my first game dev ambition, which was, as I’m ure a lot of 80’s kids ambitions were, to make and release a game for the NES.