Gamegearguy

Working on Frank the Fruit Fly 2 some more. I thought "What is in the jungle?" Then it came to me: Monkeys. Monkeys are hard to draw normally. Especially if you're limited to a 16x16 pixel space with 4 colors. So it was very difficult for me to draw this monkey. Laughing will now begin. I told you I can't draw worth crap. I added some other frames for moving left and right. The monkey is pooping down on you. If you get up above the monkey, he'll throw the poop upwards at you. If you're familiar with Game Boy programming, you'll know that I could flip the sprites without drawing the left-facing monkey. But since it's drawn with 4 8x8 sprites, I decided to make this easy on myself. Oh well. Even though lions are "king of the jungle," they're not actually in the jungle. They're in the savannah hunting zebras.

I was super bored today. It was a very very boring day today. I decided to tough out being bored for one more day and face the stupid time between my 12-hour sleep times. I sleep for at least 12 hours a night. I went and worked on Frank the Fruit Fly 2 some more. It's my Game Boy game I work on and off on I started about a month ago. Today I added fade outs and fade ins to screens. It was a really hard time doing this, but I eventually managed to get some help with it and worked it out. So tomorrow during my non-sleep time, I will test it on my Game Boy Pocket to see how it looks on it. I'll attempt to semi-alphabetize my Game Boy collection, another thing I'll probably do tomorrow if I get real bored like I did today. I plan on going to sleep soon, so I'm not going to do anything else today, which is all well and good since it's almost 9 pm here. I'll go to sleep in about an hour.

Successfully added another enemy. So now there's two. Link to the updated rom in post #1 of this thread.

So I cleaned up the pictures and tried a different color scheme. I sort of inverted some colors. I got this: The games on the menu are more readable imo. Thoughts? As for the s after the apostrophe, I was taught that you needed the s, even when the ending of the word was s. So even though that would make something like "Boss's Day" look weird, it would be correct. But who knows for sure? And yes, I added Keno. But instead of 20 numbers, I dialed it back to 10 to make it somewhat more winnable. I also tackled a bug that involved the game freezing if it was on too long.

I made a VB game of casino games a long time ago. It wasn't spectacular, but it worked. I ran across it while I was going through my old files on my computer. The code to get random numbers was really wonky, so I decided to fix it. The random numbers seem more random, but I just can't seem to avoid doing bad in video poker, even though the numbers of the cads are more random than they were. I discovered a problem with Blackjack that I think I have fixed yesterday. Then I took a nap. The nap turned out to be longer than I anticipated and woke up around midnight. I took my evening pill and tried to go back to sleep, but to no avail. Oh well. I changed the background of the game menu. Whether or not it looks better is IMO up for debate. You can get and try the rom out on the offical chris's casino webpage. Here's an early version screenshot of a younger title screen. Of course this was back when it only had 2 games instead of 4. If I were to go with the second one, I'd have to add a picture of a slot machine. I'm torn, which do you like better?

Kind of odd to put a demo when there's only two screens done so far, but I want to see if I'm doing good with this, so I'm posting a demo version of Frank the Fruit Fly 2. One thing I put in the game today was a warning sound whenever Frank loses health. I thought it was odd that it was silent and players might not know (or see) that Frank got hit by something bad. He does have a health meter up at the top. If Frank's health reaches 0% Frank dies and the game ends. And we don't want poor Frank dead, do we? One bad thing about making a game about fruit flies is that you start to feel bad when you swat or squish insects in real life. Oh well. This was hard to put in. I tried unsuccessfully to do this in the first game, but I got it working mostly in this game. Don't touch the webs!

So I was goofing off on Game Boy programming. I played a couple of Game Boy games recently and it got me in the mood. So if I was to do this, it would need a battery save like the first one. I tried and tried to put it in (it's been awhile since I last did this) but I think I got it now. One of the key things I needed to remember (but forgot) was to put "ENABLE_RAM_MBC5" in the game. So level 1 of "Frank the Fruit Fly 2" if I decide to make it, will take place deep in the jungles of Cambodia. I don't think Cambodia has jungles, though. Oh well. I'm trying to avoid places that were in "Frank the Fruit Fly" (meadow, snow, desert, water, house, forest). As it turns out, I think I will have just enough room to call the 6 levels I want to put in. One of the biggest changes of Underwear was I made it so you can skip the intro by pressing action. If you press action on either controller while the intro is playing, it will skip to the title screen. This will not be in The Horrible Ghosts of Uranus because I am afraid I'd break the game if I attempted to put it in. Thankfully, the intro isn't that long.

Most of us wear it, so why not make a video game about it? Your job is to collect underwear from various mazes. Avoid those deadly umbrellas. I've been working on this for a few days now. I'll return to the Colecovision game I was working on when I get my cartridge. I ordered it over a week ago and still nothing, not even an e-mail saying it's been shipped. You know, if you have an online shop that you don't run any more, it'd be nice to put on that page it doesn't run any more. I'm not saying it doesn't run any more, but now I'm beginning to wonder if it still is running. Has anyone bought anything from Atarimax recently? I looked on their forum and there's been posts from May of this year, but I WANT MY CARTRIDGE. I ordered it 8 days ago and that was the last I heard from them. Anyway, I have about 500 bytes left to add more maze data. I plan to keep adding maze data until the game breaks.

I worked on Flying Potato Chips today. I am beginning work on the second level. The levels changing are an indication that something in the game has changed. For example, what I want to do is: level 2 - chicken nuggets start appearing. level 3 - popcorn enemy introduced shooting and floating faster than the pretzel. level 4 - enemies can (but not necessarily will) move up and down. and so on. I think if you shoot 25 enemies worth two points each, then the boss comes. I'm just thinking out loud here. Then shoot the boss 5 times, worth 10 points each, then that's an even 100 points. I guess it doesn't have to be even. Point values can be easily changed. So can the background tiles if I need/want to. I just have to remember that each tile can only have 2 colors. Or you, if you'd like to help.

I don't have any new pictures to show. All the work done today had to do with music, so that's why. I did however add a game over screen, but it's just a "GAME OVER." message against the blue sky, so it's not really all that noteworthy. I added a title screen song, a game over song, and a level cleared song. As well as cleaning up stuff I had going wrong with the game so far. So the next time I pick this project back up, I'll begin work on the second level. Although I kind of want to wait until my cartridge comes to see if it works on my real Colecovision. I mean, there's no sense working on it if you can't play it on a real Colecovision, right? It's so cold, but if I turn off the A/c it will get real hot, so I don't know what to do. I woke up at around 3 p.m. after my usual 12 hours of sleep. Funny though how it's almost 9 p.m. and I'm not really all that tired.

Back to work on Flying Potato Chips. Today I added in the boss screen. It took a few hours to play, find bugs, try to fix the bugs, play again, find another bug, etc. But I think I have it squared away for now. I made the boss a red pretzel and he has onion rings to guard himself. You need to shoot the boss pretzel 5 in order to defeat him and go on to the next level. But there is no next level yet because I haven't got that far yet. Stuff I need to do before level 1 is finished include making some boss music and a little level clear jingle. I got even more Colecovision games today. So now I have 37 Colecovision games. I would have more, but the console's games suffer due to all the add-ons required to play those games. And there's a lot of games that I can't play because I don't have a stupid certain expansion module or special controller. I don't know why they did that. Perhaps that's a reason why we don't have Coleco in the video game biz today? I don't know.

All work and no play makes Chris a dull boy. I got a thing that will let me test my Colecovision game on a real Colecovision. And I armed the pretzels. They now shoot onion rings. So far I have 7 kb of my 32 kb filled before I need to bankswitch. Things ultimately I need to add in: more enemies. (need to think of junk food types that only are one colored.) vertical movement of enemies. chicken nugget for extra life? boss more levels. So yeah, lots more work to be done. But I have worked on lots as well.

I was looking at "Uncle Grandpa with no context" clips on YouTube and I got an idea. I was going to make my own animated show. Armed with my Pinnacle Studio 19, I began work. I know I can't draw, but that won't stop me. I've got about 1 1/3 minutes' worth of animation done. It took at least 2 hours. Then I had to "refine" and add in new ideas I thought up. And then I was done after about 45 more minutes' worth. And then I was done for the day. Bob The (The is Bob's last name) and his roll of toilet paper named Larry are going to go on a road trip because they got real bored sitting at home doing nothing (I know what that feels like!) I was wanting classical music as a score because I didn't want to make my own and I didn't want to use anything else. And I didn't want to match the feeling, so as to make it zany. So for the first 1.33 minutes, the background music is the famous "I've revealed something big" song, used in 2001: A Space Odyssey (I can't remember the name of it right now). And then the car stops. Oh no. They've run out of gas. Now what? Now what for sure because even I don't know because I haven't got that far into writing it yet. I will be sure to put this on YouTube when I am done, so I don't want to make any dirty jokes or anything. But just don't expect it any time soon.

The ultimate food fight. Which snack food beginning with the letter P will win? You play the role of Paul Peterson, a potato chip out for revenge. Seems those evil pretzels are really evil. They sure taste evil, like cardboard. This is the first level. I am going to make the pretzel shoot out onion rings sometimes. Today I discovered that if four or more sprites are on the same y register, they all blink like crazy. The only way I know of to make multicolored sprites is to use more than one. Since there's four sprites I want to put into the game (potato chip, fry, pretzel, onion ring) they all must be one color to not flicker. I really want to avoid using flicker if I can. I woke up at around 9 a.m. I didn't want to, but I was really thirsty for some reason. So I had to get up and drink water. Since I was already up, I figured I might as well stay up. That was 10 hours ago. I'm so sleepy, but I want to try to stay up to see if I can see the northern lights. I know one thing: I'm too tired to work on this any longer for today, so I'll leave it as it is until tomorrow morning (or whenever I wake up.)

I've been dabbling with Colecovision Basic a lot. I decided to attempt a port of Flying Hamburgers for it. I have so far a scrolling title screen. For the scrolling, I wanted something simple. Fortunately, I was able to get something working after a few hours and a provided example later. I can't believe there's three different shades of green. It helps with the look of the grass a lot. The straight blades help with seeing that the screen is moving forwards. Without them, it looks like it's jittering back and forth. In fact I thought the code wasn't working until I realized that perhaps it was but didn't look like it. As a test, I made it so you can move the burger around on the title screen. The scrolling made it very hard to move the burger, until I realized that if I nested the burger movement into an if...next loop in the scrolling code, it would move a lot better. This burger is really cruisin'. I wish there was a way to slow it down a bit. Or perhaps I'll keep it in like this to show the power of the Colecovision and just make the enemies move slower. So now what I need to do is start programming the first level. I'll do this the next time I get bored and want to spend a few hours programming stuff.