GGJ 16 – A Swing and a Miss

Whilst I’ve enjoyed a good streak of results from recent game jams, my first Global Game Jam didn’t go quite as planned, I felt like I was working against the Gameboy throughout the 42 hours of development time available to me, as I hadn’t done any real Gameboy development work since Ludum Dare 34 in mid December, I was going to have a rough ride of sorts in any case. Quite how rough was a bit shocking to me.

Bugs occurring at stupid hours in the morning greatly affected the amount of sleep I got in during the weekend and by Sunday morning , whilst I was determined to have something finished, there really wasn’t much of a game there, although to be fair, a clicker game isn’t much of a game anyways.
waifu
There was a lot of coding going on though, for little reward, after some issues, particularly with remembering how multi-banking worked, Waifu Clicker is a clicker game, with randomnly generated characters, password system, some sound effects, difficulty curve and sadly, not much else.

kawaaiiiAfter submitting a working initial build to the Jam site with 2 hours to go I attempted to bung the in-game shop in there but, more issues with decrementing my heart score (an unsigned 8-bit array) after the first pass and general exhaustion left me collapsed at my laptop.

Whilst it’s far from my best work, it proved to be a handy reminder for me to be prepared for game jam events and my preparations this time around were minimal to say the least.

Atari VCS Development – Day 3 – Customising my Kernel

I decided to have a play around with my Kernel code in an attempt to see if I could get some variants of graphics on the screen, whilst I’m ignoring my sprites I wanted to attempt to get a power bar working using the background alone, as I can use the NOP command to delay for 2 cycles, I can decided how long each power bar is with those commands.

I’m still experimenting with the Kernel code to wring some more out from it. But I now have more colours on one line which could be used for some sort of effects in the background. It’s not that exciting to view though so, no point in putting an image on here. At least, not until I’ve played around more with the code.

I’d like to get two different sprites on one line without any negative effects, I may have to use some flickering in order to achieve this though, racing the beam is a tad tough!

Atari VCS 2600 Assembly – Day 2

Gone is the coloured background. Here instead, are some sprites and missiles!

spritesandmissilesI’ve hoodwinked the 3rd bunch of sprites in-between scanlines and, whilst it’s proving tough to get the missiles aligned horizontally, they are firing on joypad input and both players have seperate inputs available.

I might try to demake Invasion VS onto this from my Original OUYA release. It was pretty fun to play against another person. Not sure how I could hoodwink AI into 4k but I’ll see!

I’m thinking mode switches to change the display type for each player, different player counts could lead to some decent gameplay, think air sea bttle but with players facing each other, that’s what I’m aiming for here.

It’ll be tough but I’m pleased with making some progress on the kernel today. I’d love to speed it up a bit mind you!