"Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Show us what you're working on, (preferably with screenshots).
hikoki
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by hikoki »

Joefish wrote: Wed Jan 16, 2019 11:47 am
hikoki wrote: Tue Jan 15, 2019 6:41 pm About colours, sometimes I confuse pilotesses' hair with power-up
Sorry about the colour confusion, but only certain colour combos work for the characters. After I'd designed the characters how I wanted, I tried to match the pick-ups to hair or rocket colour, but had to settle on matching the suit as I wanted to use white for the pick-up surround and have green free for the penalty pick-up. I tried swapping the magenta/green suit/hair combination but it just wasn't as good. The code now makes the pick-up change colour if it stays on screen for too long; a bit like Raiden, but I thought it was too much hassle to make them float around in a circle too!
I must insist, suits are so small in relation to hair that I cannot "see" them in practice.
Just trying to help as I think this affects playability which is far more important than looking good.
What do you think guys?
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Joefish
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Joefish »

Can't you just learn which colour is which weapon?

The magenta and yellow power-ups, as well as matching the pilots' suits, match the colour of the Hoon or the KEF-Teddies too.
That only leaves the red pick-up, and none of them have red hair.

The green pick-up has a skull on it, not a heart, so if you grab that one then you're supposed to lose your weapons for not paying attention!

I was also planning a white pick-up as a speed-up, but trying it out, it just seems crap to play the game at any speed other than the default. Making you start slow like Gradius just seems annoying, and going too fast means you crash into things.
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by hikoki »

You are right, once you get the first orb, you can learn to follow the orb colour.

As for speed power-ups, I think freezing
Spoiler
could be interesting and technically might allow for lots of things on the screen? For example, there could be lots of enemies who go straight to your ship, you could freeze them for a while after which they'd follow their march, it could be fun to manage which ones to shoot at first.
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Joefish
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Joefish »

Unfortunately you can only draw so many sprites without slowing things right down, so freezing them to stay on the screen longer is a bad idea for Speccy shooters. This sort of thing needs more control buttons too.

A shooter where you could hold FIRE for a completely different type of shot might be interesting - probably for a vertical shooter - but not this game, since that control is already used up.
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by hikoki »

Then not all of the baddies aiming at you. They could be all the same sprite with flock behaviour. There could be two flocks (two type of sprites) When you freeze them the scroll would be freezed too. Actually there would be only two sprites cloned all around the screen.
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Joefish
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Joefish »

It still takes time to render them all in each frame of the game. And if they're in different positions they'd each need their own collision detection. Making them 'clones' or 'slaves' to a lead object doesn't really save much processing time.

One approach you could take is there are several 'Score-Attack' or 'Caravan Shooter' games where the next enemy wave doesn't appear until you've completely cleared the current one, so you're never overrun with enemies - but you are up against a time limit to get e.g. highest score in 2 minutes. A 'stun' weapon there would mean you'd still want to clear the screen quickly to get on to the next wave. Maybe something for another game. It would also be a good way of giving the player something like a 'smart bomb' extra weapon, but without requiring too much in the way of extra graphical effects!
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by hikoki »

I don't get why every member of the flock would need its own collision detection. As a flock their positions may be determined at all times. You'd just have to check your ship and last bullet? Maybe make them all disappear at once if any of them are collided.
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Joefish
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Joefish »

Which is the 'last bullet' when you can fire four at once? And why just the 'last bullet'? That doesn't make sense.

If they're in different positions, and all the bullets are in different positions, then you need to collision check them all individually to see if they've been shot. It doesn't matter if you do it by marking where they are on a map and checking the map, or calculating where they all are mathematically, it still takes time.
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by hikoki »

Why just one bullet? To reduce time processing? Check collisions only at certain times, you could make it clear for the player when a check is going to happen by colourising such "golden" bullets. As for enemies to be checked on the flock, there could be also only one at a time, if you managed to hit it the entire flock would disappear.
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Joefish
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Joefish »

If you don't check for every collision for every frame of the game then shots pass right through enemies without 'hitting' them, and you end up with an unplayably crap game.
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by hikoki »

I just say that bullets would go out in alternate colours so the player could tell when collisions are going to be checked. This may reduce computing time and still feel precise enough for the player.
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Bizzley »

hikoki wrote: Mon Jan 21, 2019 5:59 pm I just say that bullets would go out in alternate colours so the player could tell when collisions are going to be checked. This may reduce computing time and still feel precise enough for the player.
Can you expand on this because it all sounds a bit illogical to be honest? When you say "alternate colours" do you mean alternating the game frames the bullets move on (half on even frames, half on odds) or something else because it's not clear what changing the colour of a bullet would have on accurate collision detection? Do you foresee a frame of the game where some bullets are not being checked for collision detection at all?
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by hikoki »

I don't know maybe you can disguise a ray by drawing a line as a gradient from light (bullet end) to dark (tail end) giving it an appearance of motion so that your fake bullets seem to travel a shorter distance than they actually do each time you check for collisions.
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Joefish
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Joefish »

Done a bit more bunnycoding.
Looks like it'll be all too easy to drop down to four frames where there's a lot going-on on-screen.

I've added some code to draw wall-like obstructions like rock spikes sticking out from the top and bottom of the screen, a bit like what you see in DELTA on the C64. These are like double-height sprites but quicker to draw, so long as they stay in the top or bottom third of the screen and don't straddle the 2K boundaries. I've also started sketching a couple of alternate backdrops, though it's hard to make a screen look interesting while being sure to re-use enough tiles for it to store efficiently. I have made it so the backdrops can be re-coloured on the fly so they can be re-used for later levels.

I've also integrated the Special-FX tune player from Beepola to add some incidental bits of tune between levels. Not sure whether to go it alone or see if someone more experienced with it would like to tune-up my tuneage. For a main tune I found a useful website http://www.musicnotes.com that has lots of simple arrangements of pop songs and popular tunes - though maybe an original piece of music would be better?

I did find a bug in the player though - there's an ADD A,L and LD L,A to step through part of the tune or part of a percussion effect, to add A to HL. But if the table it's using spans a page break it can't do the sum in 8-bits and it crashes. Had to change it to LD D,0 / LD E,A / ADD HL,DE to do the 16-bit sum properly.
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Joefish
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Joefish »

New scrolly level background, new logo graphics:

Image

Just been debugging it for attribute clashes as it pixel scrolls... Quite a pain.
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Ast A. Moore
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Ast A. Moore »

Looking great. I’ve always loved cyan on the Spectrum.
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Joefish »

I'm drawing the backgrounds in ZX Paintbrush. They come out as three screens wide and a third high.
I've written myself a compressor so that it can pick out re-used 16x16 blocks and build up a map. So I try to use a lot of copy+paste when designing to keep it efficient. The pain in the arse is making sure that the attributes are all the same even in the character cells that don't have any visible pixels.
I'm trying to keep it to around 4:1 compression, so using around 40-48 blocks over 192 map cells on each level graphic.

I loosely based this view on the reddish interstitial night-time views of 'National City' from series 2 of DC's Supergirl, which I gather is really showing the cluster of towers that make up downtown Los Angeles, with the hills in front and the suburbs spreading out behind.
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DouglasReynholm
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by DouglasReynholm »

Ast A. Moore wrote: Sat Mar 02, 2019 10:21 pm Looking great. I’ve always loved cyan on the Spectrum.
Always loved the Speccy colour palette, so vibrant, even given it's limitations. The C64 had more colours yes, as did the 464. But in those modes the pixels were widened and blocky to boot. The 464 had a nice palette, could put out some nice pics given the care it rarely got, but the palette of the 64 was awful, really earthy/muddy. I'll go for the attribute clash and the better resolution thanks.
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R-Tape
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by R-Tape »

Great pic, fantastic new logo. What's the crack with the new publisher name?

Sorry for the nitpick, but the shading makes the title skirt close to 'Ga Ga' to my eye.

How fancy is your compressor?
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Joefish
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Joefish »

I think I needed my own label if I've made more than one game! 'Ionian' comes from sitting at a desk here while writing the Buzzsaw+ title screen multicolour code:

Image

I've written some tools in Borland Visual C++. The background one loads a .scr, then cuts it up into 16x16 tiles. You'll notice the whole thing uses the same 25% offest stipple, so each tile can be shrunk down to 8x8 pixels and 2x2 attributes. (The scroll routine expands them out again into alternate pixels on alternate lines).
The compressor then compares each tile with any that it's already done and replaces them in the map with the previous tile ID. Then the map and the minimum tile set are saved as defb data statements.

I've also written a simple run-time compressor for the logo that can skip empty characters and re-use attributes to save data space. It's not doing the most efficient algorithmic compression you can get, but it's quicker to decode by using something simple that works in whole bytes rather than a compressed bit-stream.
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Pegaz
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Pegaz »

DouglasReynholm wrote: Sat Mar 02, 2019 10:42 pm
Ast A. Moore wrote: Sat Mar 02, 2019 10:21 pm Looking great. I’ve always loved cyan on the Spectrum.
Always loved the Speccy colour palette, so vibrant, even given it's limitations. The C64 had more colours yes, as did the 464. But in those modes the pixels were widened and blocky to boot. The 464 had a nice palette, could put out some nice pics given the care it rarely got, but the palette of the 64 was awful, really earthy/muddy. I'll go for the attribute clash and the better resolution thanks.
Wow, just 3 posts and we've already got to blocky / earthy / muddy commode ... ;)
I like the Spectrum palette too, but I never liked color clash and I often wanted to have orange color and more gray shades, but I learned to live with it.
All 8bit computers have their limitations, even the best among them as MSX 2 and BBC Master.
Blockiness has never been a issue for me back in the day on old crt TVs, even in multicolour mode, and especially not in hires 320x200 resolution.
If the colors are washed out, increase the saturation, how difficult it can be...
After all I'm not playing a palette, but good games and c64 and Spectrum are the best on that matter.
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by dfzx »

Joefish wrote: Sun Mar 03, 2019 6:07 am 'Ionian' comes from...
Oh, right! When I saw the graphic I read it as "eye-onion"!
Derek Fountain, author of the ZX Spectrum C Programmer's Getting Started Guide and various open source games, hardware and other projects, including an IF1 and ZX Microdrive emulator.
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Ast A. Moore
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Ast A. Moore »

Joefish wrote: Sun Mar 03, 2019 6:07 am I think I needed my own label if I've made more than one game! 'Ionian' comes from sitting at a desk here while writing the Buzzsaw+ title screen multicolour code.
I just call it natural major. There’s no need to go all fancy with Ionian or Aeolian. The rest of them make sense, of course, but these two—come on! :lol:
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by R-Tape »

Skegpool is looking splendid in that pic Joe :D

Eek. The chemist in me read it as 'ionion', which I thought was a great name!
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Joefish
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Re: "Go-Go BunnyGun", first screen grabs.

Post by Joefish »

Well, the confusion is understandable; the blue domes are more typical of Dodecanese architecture than Ionian. :lol:
Anyway, is 'Ga-Ga BunnyGun' so bad? :D
I've made a few tweaks, but making the 'o's rounder means either a bigger mask or the odd white pixel on the blue logo... :geek:
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