Gamegearguy

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.

I think I'm responsible for half the Odyssey² homebrew library, if not more. Yet I'm starting work on a new Odyssey² game. This time it's a port of the game Paku Paku. I wondered if the Odyssey² could handle it, so I'm trying to do it. I just started on this yesterday. So there's tons more left to do. It was like that with the Intellivision, some one else did Pac-Line for the Intellivision. And I was sad. But shocked nobody tried to do Pac-Line for the Odyssey² yet. So I'm doing it. Or at least trying to. It's been rough going so far. I had a horrendous time trying to start it since it wasn't agreening with what I wanted to do. But then everything fell into place for some reason and it worked. Weird stuff that happened included only eating dots when Pac-man moved left, only eating dots when Pac-man moved right, Pac-man only eating certain dots. But it isn't doing it any more. Another hard thing to do was putting in the score. Odyssey² programming is kind of like a blind person trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle. The computer tells you if you did something right or wrong. Argh.

Footage of level 1. I hope I'm somewhere near finished...

It wasn't released anywhere, but "Stupidman" by me was written in C. http://www.atari2600land.com/nintendostuff/stupidman.html

A new version of the game has been posted in the link in post #1. Let me know if you find something weird happen if you play it.

I decided to attempt to make a Jaguar game. This is what I have so far, with a little music playing. I had a really hard time trying to make the pineapple be small at the beginning and then zoom up to the front of the screen but I did it. The Jaguar has built-in scaling effects, so I just used them. The sound of it zooming up was hard to make. So was the title screen music. Putting the music into the game was even harder. So now with the title screen completed, I now need to work on the game. In the game, you control a pineapple. There's a bunch of bananas bouncing around the screen. Your job is to dodge them. Think "Dodge-It" for the Channel F. Only with a tropical flair. And with better graphics. You may remember my Pineapple game for the Atari 7800. That is what I'm aiming for. And with the Jaguar's extra power, I hope to have a whole bunch more pineapples bouncing around the screen. One problem is the game size. I only have 2MB of size for the game. I just got done with the title screen and I'm already at 641KB. So that'll be a problem. I got out my Skunkboard and tested the game with my Jaguar and all works well.

I changed the lemon back to a banana. And during the past week or so I finished the game. And now it is ready for release. And it will be released. I don't know exactly when, within a few months or so. I think I did a pretty good job putting this in 2k. I have one byte left, so I really had to cram stuff in there, AND also make it work at the same time. I also came back to my Odyssey 1 project I started a year ago. I designed the overlay to part 1, not to mention think it up. Now I just need to think up of an ending part for it. I didn't get to sleep until 2a.m. since I was trying to program something. I didn't want to give up, but at the same time, I knew I had to go to sleep some time. So eventually I did.

I don't know why, but I keep changing my 2k Atari 2600 game Fruit Fly Fun. I guess it's an attempt to try making it better and better. I never did like the banana in the bottom. So I changed it to a lemon. And I changed the clouds so they look far away. Since they do, I then decided to get rid of the enemies going behind the clouds part since there was no longer a need for it. Most of the work was attempting to avoid jagged edges on the playfield (clouds, lemon). I don't know why it happens, especially on this game, but it has. I had to carefully code the program to avoid it from doing stuff I don't want it to do. That is why the clouds are that shape, that is why the lemon is the shape it is. Putting more clouds on the screen will break what I wanted to do and make them asymmetrical. At first I thought, "Well they're clouds. They don't have to be." But then I thought that was the easy way out, and so after hours more of work, I got what you see here. The banana's shape bothered me. I just couldn't get it to work like I wanted it to. Especially within the confines of me avoiding jagged edges. So I had no other choice. It had to be something different. And so I changed it to a lemon. I wanted it to have tips at the end, but there was no room to do it in. Not that I had enough space, I have around 60 bytes left, it was because the loop was doing too much. I figured that was why it wasn't working well. So I had to cut back a few things I wanted. Now it is in a state where I wanted it to be after a few days of working on it. I picked it back up 3 days ago. So what's next for it? If you want to publish the game, let me know.

When one thinks about 2k games for the Atari 2600, they think of titles like Kaboom, Breakout, and Golf. The first ever Atari 2600 homebrew, Okie Dokie, is 2k. Well, a year ago, I thought I'd take a stab at a better 2k game for the Atari 2600. My first one about a stalk of celery burning vegetarians in an incinerator was just too far out there. It was also my first assembly game. If I was going to make a 2k game, I would need to do it in assembly instead of Batari Basic. I had to stop programming the game because I just couldn't get the scanline steady, which meant the display would jiggle a little when certain things happened on a real TV. Oddly, the emulator doesn't emulate the jiggling display, so I have to play it on an Atari 7800 (or 2600) to see it jiggle. The emulator does however count the scanlines, and if it goes above (or below) 262, the jiggling will happen. So, with the Hamburgers game gear game complete, I needed something to work on. I decided I would come back to this just for fun, to see if I could make the scanline steady. I wouldn't get mad because my hopes weren't very high with this. But a few hours later, I came up with something. I haven't seen the scanline be anything except 262. A red number means the scanline number changes, and it does that if the reset switch is used, but it doesn't jiggle on my 7800. So what is this game? I was trying to think of a game that a.) I could program, b.) would fit in 2k, and c.) be fun to play. I thought of the old SNES game Mario Paint. It had a minigame where you swat flies. The light bulb came on in my mind and I began to work on it. And this is the result: You control a flyswatter (the purple box-like thing). Avoid the hornets and the bees and swat the flies that take a bite of the banana in the middle of the screen if you give them enough time to. The game ends if you touch a hornet, or touch a bee, or the banana completely disappears. And it fit in 2k. I have abour 30 bytes left to make changes or fix bugs, or perhaps add another feature, although I don't know what that would be seeing as how it would need to be only about 30 bytes. The cat has been acting strange lately. They say they do that if there's an earthquake about to happen...

I added a few things to Hamburgers. I added a pretzel that can shoot and moves randomly. The pretzel starts on level 11. It shoots potato chips at you. And since there is a level 11, I got rid of the message on the screen that said the level number. I figured it should say the level number instead of "level 2" when you're actually on level 12. So I just changed it to say "new level." This was apparently not easy to do. I had to spend a few hours trying to get two words to display correctly on the screen. Which futher cements my fear that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. So that's what I did yesterday and tonight.

So I got all done redesigning all the levels. I got some feedback and I tried to put in an explosion sprite for when an enemy gets shot. I had my eye hurt because I was so angry because it wasn't working. So with my eye hurting I had to quit for the night. I woke up this afternoon and worked some more and I think I got it successfully in. I also changed it so the shooting enemies look different than the normal ones. I also decided to start with the milkshakes, then at level 4 introduce the pizza slice, then at level 7 introduce the taco. I also want to introduce a pretzel that would randomly move around at level 11, but I don't know what to make it shoot out. So now I'm trying to recover from my dibilitating eyeache I had last night. It hurts a tiny bit, way less than yesterday. When I have these eyeaches, it really hurts really bad. So bad I have to vomit at one point, which I did last night. I had to taste the horrible orange-flavored chewable aspirin since I used up the horrible cherry-flavored chewable asprin last night. It helped tonight, but I wish it did last night.

Imagine laying on the nice sand at a tropical beach with palm trees, when suddenly a hamburger flies by trying to down a chocolate milkshake by shooting French fries at it. This is level 7 of my game I'm trying to make good. I spent almost all of yesterday trying to put in a second enemy but I ultimately couldn't because I had a couple of bugs come in. So I had to leave it at just one at a time. This picture was hard to do because it kept saying it had 18 colors. So I made it 18 colors and looked at the color table and then saw the sand was three colors for some reason I don't know. So I made it one and now it has 14 colors. The Game Gear's maximum background palette size is 16 colors. I am trying to make the look of the game more cartoonish in the hopes that it will look better and ultimately get released by someone somewhere. The size got lowered down to 128k since I had previously real-life-looking graphics thus making the number of tiles being used for the background bigger. So now I have one bank completely empty, which I hope to add some backgrounds to it for levels 8 and 9. Level 10 seems okay, so I don't need to redo that. I can't wait for Sunday when I'm going to get my hair cut. It's super long and bothering me, making me hot and making my head hurt.

I changed the underwater scene and removed the fish and shark. I also made it so if you shoot an onion ring in the boss levels it actually hits it instead of going right through it. If anyone has any suggestions for the game, please let me know!

I've been busy redoing some stuff with the game. I've been making new backgrounds and longer background songs. Here is a sample of my work so far. I'm also going to add more levels and I changed it from a "get to the end"-type game to a "see how many points you can get"-type game.

I woke up this morning. I noticed the left side of my face was all red and hot. But what was odd is that the right side of my face was fine. I kept occasionally feeling my face to see how hot it was, and it has been going down a little, and the redness has got down a little as well. But it's still there, just not as bad as it was when I got up a few hours ago. This never happened before. I have also been trying to get used to the new development studio for Game Boy I have been using with no problems. It underwent a few changes since I last downloaded it and basically just wrecked all my stuff so I had to redo some stuff and I've been trying to figure out it. I also came back to my Game Gear game. After Flying Hamburgers got rejected, I have been trying to make it better with new music and backgrounds. I also changed it so it doesn't end and the object of the game is to get a high score. I noticed the word "pause" was behind the burger. So I fixed that. It was the first work I had done on the game for about a month. What I want to do next is make a new background and music for level 3, the desert. The level shown here is the redesigned cave (level 2). As you can see, I also changed the score to six digits instead of just three.

Golden Pineapples is like that marble jumping game where you jump marbles over each other like in checkers. There is a twist in my game though: you can move a pineapple even if it won't jump over a pineapple to remove it. Right now there are seven levels but I plan to add many more along with some choosable background music. There are instructions on the game's website. http://www.atari2600land.com/gameboy/goldenpineapples.html This is a screenshot of the Super Game Boy version.

I think the game is completely finished. I'm testing for bugs now. If you would like to help, PM me and I'll send the rom.

OK, so someone at AtariAge helped me to make Bert's pupils black. So I guess the question now is: Would you buy this? I don't want to have unsold copies of this game sitting around. I also have been working on Game Boy programming. I have been working on tree collision on a game I just started called "The Legend of Helga." I improved what I had earlier this morning and now it's working just fine. I'm at a good place to stop now, so I'll pause work on this for a few days and see where I want to take this. I don't know, I guess I'll have to continue work on something or else I'll be bored. I have trouble falling asleep because my mind is always being creative and thinking of stuff to do. When I get tired, I'm usually working on something and sleeping has to wait because I think I'm close to a major breakthrough when I'm actually not and need to find a good stopping point because I don't want to make a simple mistake because I'm really sleepy and then have the game break with no way of finding out how I broke it. (how's that for a run-on sentence?)

After a flurry of programming this morning and afternoon, I finished the paperclip game. Although I did have to spend a few hours making the picture steady, which took a couple of extra hours. But I think I have everything in it: The pigeons, the paperclips, what else could a program about Bert need? Well, someone to publish a few dozen copies with overlay would be nice. I designed the overlay, all someone has to do is print them. And have the cartridges made. Since as to not profit off the game, I'll make it free if I ever make it. Yes, I'll have to eat the costs, but perhaps Sesame Workshop won't go after me then.