Re: [stella] [POLL] What is everybody working on?

[Christopher Tumber <christophertumber@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Manuel asked:

>So, what else is cooking? Please report!

I've spent the last 6 weeks or so preparing the inventory for this:

http://www.theauctionpage.net/Nov_29_30.htm

But that's not really what you mean...

Prior to that undertaking, I had been working with Adam Tierney on Fade Out. The basic kernal is there, but it still needs quite a bit of work and there are lots of issues - No second player displayed (it's in the kernal though), shot always goes to the right and never stops. Jumping horizontally sucks. &etc, &etc.

This week-end I was able to take some time for myself and actually do some coding (which I haven't been able to do since taking on the above mentioned contract) so of course I started another new project (smile). This ones almost done though, and it may look a little familiar (smile)...

Thomas' last couple of games (Cave1k and Splatform) got me thinking about games with minimalist controls. What can be done with just one button (Not just a binary input, there's off, on and duration - like morse code) or just left/right type controls. Or similar. And Cave1k got me thinking about the kernal in Mortal Kurling, which, IMHO is a pretty nice looking scroller but with the big disadvantage that there's not a lot of time left on a scanline to do much other than draw the player's ship and shot (ie: Enemies can't be on the same scanlines as the scroll - So the enemies movement is restricted and so are the scanlines which can have the scrolling "walls"). But with the game mechanic from Cave1k (et al) that's not really the issue. So at first I was just going to adapt the Mortal Kurling scroller. But then I thought I could do even better by not having to worry at all about displaying anything else but the player's ship (helicopter) and really tailor the kernal to that. So I rewrote the kernal from scratch, this is the result. The "walls" use P1/M1/M0 (all trippled) and Ball. The helicopter is P0 (also trippled but GRP0 gets cleared)

Still needs a little work, the cave layout generation is a bit rudimentary and it never really gets harder except by chance. There's also in the kernal the capability to do a horizotal strip through the center of the cave (a fork in the road..) but it's currently disabled and I may just take it out sonce I think it works well as is and I might be able to save a scanline or two between "bricks" (lots of calcs during display) but removing that completely. Maybe enough to add another row which would be nice. I'd also like to do something about the monochrome colour, and animate the helicopter but there's really not a lot of time left...

Anyway...


Chris...

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