Gamegearguy

So awhile back, I made an Intellivision game called "Upmonsters" about a group of monsters who keep jumping up on clouds that keep popping up while it scrolls up. I ran out of ideas for my Minigame Mayhem. So someone suggested some stuff and so I looked back on all the games I created, and decided to attempt a port of the game for it. This is the result. I made it so the game autoscrolls up. And the goal has been changed so that the point of the game is to see how far up you can go. But other than that, it's mostly all there: The bird, the bird's warning chirp, the clouds. With the fact that now I can make some games "unlocked," I will make this one of them. A new goal is to have 12 games, half of which are locked. If you beat a certain score on one of the games, a new game will be unlocked. But for now they will all be unlocked so people can easily test them and find bugs if there are any.

So I learned how to make save states. This can be useful. For example, I can now make an "unlockable" game. If a player scores a certain score, a game can be then unlocked and then it can save that it's been unlocked so you can go back to it even when you power the VB off and then turn it back on again. In order for this to work, the Virtual Boy cartridge would require a battery. I don't know how plentiful that would be or how feasible it would be to get cartridges made if they need batteries to back up memory. I've been toying with a new minigame based on Doodle Jump with a few differences: the platforms (in this case clouds) are always scrolling. If you need to stop for some reason, you can just pause the game. the score changes when a platform gets down off the screen. I tried to make it more similar, but it didn't work well enough for me to approve. There is still work to be done on the doodle jump game, like make sure you are able to jump on a cloud, and/or add some more clouds to jump on. I am tired of error messages for today so I'll quit for now.

I have finished the Mouth game in my VB minigame collection: I also went back and worked some more on Fruit Fly Fun, making the bees bigger: Next I will work on a Doodle Jump clone. All I need to do on my Odyssey game is go to the post office and mail them. I don't know how since I'm asleep all day and awake all night. If only the post office was open at 2 a.m. My mouth I designed when closed looks like a clam. I guess it would since it is basically a clam.

Hi! I have been sharing my progress about the game on the Planet VB Discord channel. I'm surprised someone got 100% new parts so we can apparently quit cannibalizing old cartridges. I've been using VIDE and Programmers' Notepad, and that's been working fine so far.

Not many Virtual Boy homebrew. Aside from Elevated Speed, basically...nothing else. So I am making a game for the Virtual Boy. It is a collection of minigames. It's called "Minigame Mayhem." Right now there are five completed minigames on it and I am busy working on game #6: A "Fast Food" semi-clone. You can play what I have of the ROM and see my progress on the official Minigame Mayhem site.

An update on Six². I began the tedious work of wrapping the tubes in brown paper. I have half of them done. After that's done, I will do the labels. All the addresses are in a document so I just print them out and tape them onto the tubes. An update on Action 54. Since people were really thinking I was going to have 54 minigames, I decided to rename the game. It's now called "Minigame Mayhem." Although I seem that's too close a title to this: I don't know. What do you think?

So yesterday I worked on the graphics for Fruit Fly Fun some more, refining them and making them look better. I ended up with this: And today, I worked on random number generating, trying to make it better. The game now uses SRAM to generate random numbers and to keep track of them so it doesn't do the same sequence of them every time you turn the VB on. I failed to do this on Supper Mario because I didn't know what was being done (I made it 6 years ago, so I forgot), but it should be random enough. The rest of the games use better random number generating. Since I'm tired of coding a lot, I'll put off moving the fly and bee (which should be easier now) until tomorrow. The game works on a HyperFlash32, so if you have one, you can download what I have with my game progress (link).

Not that many!

What about Alien Cat 1?

Worked on initial work on Fruit Fly Fun, the newest minigame for Action 54. Unfortunately, I can't flip the flyswater sprite, so it will have to be like this. Stuff I need to do: make fly move introduce bee make bee move have game end if swatter touches bee. I got it working on a real Virtual Boy so that's good. I also want to add a pause function to the games, so before I do anything else, I'll probably do that.

The Virtual Boy is a strange machine. Its "screen" is 384 x 244 pixels. Which is unfortunate since unsigned characters only go up to 255. Which means if I want to put a sprite, say, monsterx, at 364, I'd have to make monsterx an int which would make it a 16-bit number, and a lot of wasted space there. So in the effort to make Cranberry Capers a lot better, technically speaking, I limited the monsterx to an unsigned character. And then I put two more in there for good measure. Speaking of "measure," I found myself with a bout of insomnia, so I decided to get out of bed and put in the SMB theme for "Supper Mario." Three hours of programming and a lot of attempts later, I think I did it. Unfortunately, the music doesn't seem to sound very good on a real VB. The project I am making is a bunch of minigames all on one cartridge. I call it "Action 54." I'm calling "Cranberry Capers," the minigame with the screenshot above, completed. Tomorrow (or whenever), I'll begin work on a new minigame, about fly swatting (think Mario Paint.) Last night at about 7:30pm, I heard a giant explosion. It sure sounded near. And it was loud. And it didn't really sound like lightning. I don't know what happened. I guess I never will. Whatever it was didn't knock the power out, so that's good.

OK, so I have been working on a Virtual Boy game. It's called "Action 54". It's like the NES game Action 52, because it's a collection of mini-games. But it won't have 54 games in it. I don't think I can think of 50 more game ideas. I have one that I will program when I am done with the current one I've been working on: a fly swatting game. Swatting flies in a video game seems to be fun. While I was working, a dumb ant came crawling on my arm. Oh well. Here is a picture of the minigame I've been working on. It may change. In fact it probably will because just one monster seems like it would be too easy. Fruits will pop up on the screen and your job as the cranberry is to save them from the monsters. There is one thing missing from these games: Background music. But I did put in a few sparse sound effects for now. I tested this on a real Virtual Boy and after a few hours of massaging the code, I got it working now. My anus bump is still there. I have been putting Prep H on it like 4 times a day for a few days now. And it's still there. I'm beginning to doubt it isn't hemmorhoids at all.

I am having quite the time trying to figure out who is who. If you could, PLEASE say your VGS username when ordering, as well as your address, so I can tell easily. I have a Scott who paid me, but I don't know his VGS username. Scott, if you could PM me, that'd be great. I am going to mail these sometime this week, most likely Thursday or Friday (I had an influx of people interested, so I need to make more cards, which meant ordering more paper, so I need that to come.) I still need payments from a few people, I will PM you if I do.

So I took some time to work on this some more. I had a tough time because it wasn't wokring right. I was doing everything correctly, but it decided to not obey me. But I finally got it to do something I wanted it to. Get to the screen with my history teacher on it. There he is. He has a little 2-frame animation walk when you move him, much like the umpire in Ugly Uppity Umpire. I should mention that he is in color if you put the game in a GBC. Just three colors, though (red, yellow, and brown). Why did I choose those colors? Most junk food is, in fact, red, yellow and brown. And so are lemons. I am putting Prep H on my disc-y bump up my butt. It still hurts when I poop. Or put some Prep H on it. It is raining here, which is mentionable since we haven't had any since like June. If you think it rains in Oregon all the time, you're wrong. And I never did hear any weather report since there's no local news due to the fact that all 4 stations that would have local news on have college football on.

Today I worked on music for the title screen of my new Game Boy game. This is all I'll do today because I don't feel like working very hard on things. There's all these projects I start. And I finish like 25% of them. And I work really hard on them and I still don't get much done. I want to take a minute to talk about hemmorhoids. There's this disc-shaped bump up my butt. Or at least I think it's disc-shaped. It feels like it anyway. Sometimes I'd have bloody stools. But those were discontinued and in its place was pain. So today I got some Preparation H to see if that will help. If not, I guess I'll have to go to the doctor. I don't know why I keep having all these bad medical things happening to me. First it was the fatty liver, which, while not painful, isn't very good. So I have to take a walk every day. I walk for like 10 minutes before my legs start hurting and I have to stop. And then it's the anus problem.

I finally got around to dabbling in Game Boy Color coding. My goal was to see if I could make a lemon yellow when it was on a GBC, and light gray on a normal GB. Mission accomplished: I also put in a red color. There's also a third, which is brown. The goal of the game I want to make is make it like Fast Food only have the food go from left to right AND right to left, AND up and down as well. The history teacher is only wanting to eat lemons while avoiding the hamburgers. I want the hamburger bun to be yellow, the patty to be brown, and the ketchup to be red. Sort of like the Yum! game I made for the Game Gear only the guy can move around instead of closing his mouth to avoid food. So I think I'm going to have to give up on X vs. O since yesterday one time it started a new game without me pressing o on the keyboard. This after playing the thing for 15 minutes.

So I found some bugs with that last version. I took an attempt to try to fix them. It took about 20 minutes of playing to find one, and another one popped up after only a few minutes. I noticed both the bugs had something in common (I think), it was placing an X when I should have been placing an O. Or at least I think so. My brain turns to mush and I stop thinking rationally when I work on stuff for too long. I took yet another look at the code and discovered that when the X was placed, it wasn't adding a turn to the turn counter. So I luckilly had enough room to direct it to the code where it does so after it checks for a win. This is aggravating me and I want it to stop. I also took a stab last night to make a title screen that says "CEDAR GAMES." I remembered that I could use the grid. I tried to use three sprites but that took up too much room. This is what I came up with. I know it looks dorky, but I kind of like it. This was my best attempt drawing with the grid. I couldn't draw an M with the grid and also fit an S in there as well. So I put an M character there instead. I don't know, I really hate the letters M and W. They are such a hassle when I'm trying to create fonts. Or I guess this time it was Odyssey 2 grid drawing limitations. My favorite letter is Q.

Well, it took a LOT longer than I anticipated but I finally got win detection in. I had to sacrifice the words "CEDAR GAMES" during the intro, though, so now it just looks like this: X is green and O is blue. If X wins, the grid turns green, and if O wins the grid turns blue. The grid turns red if there's a tie. I had to spend all my waking hours Sunday on this stupid thing without getting it done. So I had to go to sleep at some point. So I did. I woke up today and began work anew and I think I finally got things straightened out. If you have an Odyssey 2 emulator, play it on this and let me know if I did something wrong. Also, take a screencap of your weirdness. Programming the win detection was really hard. I had to try a couple of things for it to work decently.

So I finally got it working after 6 hours. You can now input letters in the tic-tac-toe minigame. I have about 300 bytes left to check for wins. I had to move an awful lot of codes all over the place. I think I must have spent 4 hours moving around code in desparation trying to make the thing work. The left controller enters the X's and the right one does O's. Since the controlers have 8 directions to move the joystick and a button, that makes 9 possible inputs, which works perfectly for this. I also made it so you can't make a letter where there's already a letter. I think I am going to use the letter double check variables to check for wins. One interesting thing to note is that a win is not possible until move #5 at the earliest. I tried it on my Odyssey 2. An extra 2 where there shouldn't have been prevented the game from working. So I removed the 2 and it works just fine...for now. This is hard.

From tic-tac-toe to the gridiron, x's and o's have always hated each other. Now you can step inside an X's shoes and experience what it's like to be an o hating x. Well, not NOW, I just started with the game. Yep, it's a new game I started work on for the Odyssey 2. I don't know what the game will be like, I just created this since I was really bored. What I want is an 8k game. In bank 3 (the first bank), I plan to put in an Easter egg - a tic-tac-toe game. In banks 2-0 will be the game itself (whatever it is.) I have to think backwards since Odyssey 2 games with more than one bank start on bank 3. I don't know why. I didn't design the thing. So the first thing I will make is the tic-tac-toe game. I thought of a way to enter x's and o's in a grid: if the player presses up on the controller, the x (or o) will go in the upper center. If the player presses left/up, it will go in the upper left corner. ACTION button presses put it in the center part. But that's for tomorrow. I don't want to make my eye hurt again getting angry at this game. So it will be baby steps. I had enough anger trying to make my compiled correctly game actually do what I told it to this morning. I slept almost all day yesterday. I woke up at about 6 a.m. and it was 11 a.m. when I got really sleepy and slept for about 7 hours. Woke up, watched tv for an hour, and then went to sleep at about 8:30 p.m. Woke up today (Friday) at around 6 a.m.

So a major milestone has been hit in me and this project: the mailing tubes came. They are 2" wide and 13" tall, just perfect for all the stuff to fit in there. So now what's left to do is this: Pack up the games, get peoples' addresses and money post instruction manual on line mail them out. Don't know when I'll go to the post office, I'll try for next week sometime. The doctors' office called. Remember that ultrasound I had last month sometime? They FINALLY called and said I had fatty liver. I don't know what I'm supposed to do about that. I guess eat better (read: food that tastes disgusting) I was hoping for more people to buy the game, but oh well. I guess I should be glad that I sold some and actually have a use for 20 mailing tubes. I just wish I didn't have to give feed back for every single thing I buy on eBay. Required feedback is stupid. That's all for today.

Let us make a thread to talk about Game Boy playing and stuff. I'll start. I beat round 25 of Tetris 2. I doubt I can get past this. I think I have broken SNES controllers. I started on round 24.

OK, thanks! I was having quite a bit of trouble trying to find that.

It's the Halloween season. I have been on an Odyssey kick since I announced my game and taking preorders for it here at the Video Game Sage. So I needed to find an avatar that combined the two. I found it. This is a card from the Haunted House game for the Magnavox Odyssey. I scanned it, cleaned it up, and shrank it down. Unfortunately, I wanted the word "cat" to be visible, but I guess I can't. So say goodbye to Uncle Sam holding a bowl of corn flakes for now. He'll return in November. That avatar is from an old Corn Flakes TV ad from 1983. It was on a VHS tape I had.

I thought it would be cool to display a special Halloween avatar since it's that season, but I can't figure out how to change my avatar. How do I do this?