The Pit

[Dr_Dave]

https://youtu.be/3IpPztRz470

Progress...

- Added scoring
- Added high score table
- Added level completion
- Added tank shooting
- Also fixed a load of bugs

Phew!

The tank shooting turned out to be not as awful as I thought it would be. Once I had some functions sorted out to check if chars were empty, to copy characters down, it all came together. Interestingly, having the timer in place really adds something to navigating the bottom half of the screen. Knowing that it's ticking away up there and you can't see it really adds to the tension of trying to get out of the diamond room.

Only got a few functional tasks left now:

- Robots
- The Pit room
- Falling missiles
- Shooting

Then it's just making sure two player works, increasing the difficulty, different level layouts etc.

Then I can finally play around with my Next

[Firefox]

That's looking very nice!

I notice there's a tunnel that leads up behind the Zonker. Is there some way you can disable it or slow it down?

[Dr_Dave]

That's looking very nice!

I notice there's a tunnel that leads up behind the Zonker. Is there some way you can disable it or slow it down?

In the arcade, that tunnel is where the enemy robots deploy. They kind of pile in behind the zonker and drop down. I've never tried getting up there, funnily enough! Maybe in The Pit 2, you'll escape up this tunnel into a sprawling open world MMO

[dfzx]

Only got a few functional tasks left now:

How about a decent squish animation when he gets crushed by a falling rock?

[Dr_Dave]

https://youtu.be/bGaTIW9EbIc

Progress:

- Added falling missiles
- Added pit monster
- Added pit trap
- Added robots
- Added shooting
- Added options screen
- Added joystick support
- Added some placeholder (and awful) sound effects
- Performance improvements

Busy week! Actually, most of this week was spent rebuilding stuff from the ground up for performance. I redid my buffering routine after adding in the monster and finding the framerate tanked... shifting sprites is real expensive! Next time, I'd probably consider using pre-shifted sprites for the time it would save. I don't seem to be coming close to the memory limit, on this game at least.

Everything else was relatively trouble free. The code is at the stage where adding in new stuff is really just adding in variations on existing themes, so a lot of code can be repurposed. Not that I'm doing too much of that... I seem to be mostly content to copy and paste routines, rather than make them generic. The shame of doing that is offset by the lack of mental anguish trying to shoehorn register states into other scenarios. Maybe one day I'll refactor it... ho ho!

One great thing this week was the release of zesarux 8.1, which fixed the issues I was having with the Z80 debugger and made problem diagnosis 100x easier. It's so nice to be able to step back and forward through code as it runs...

Okay, the game is mostly complete now! Certaintly, all of the game elements are there. It all hangs together reasonably well. So what's left to do?

1) Make sure the 1/2 player transition is working properly. I've been kind of coding with this in mind all along, but haven't tied it all together. I'm sure it'll be fine
2) Figure out the difficulty progression. At the moment, things are just pretty much drawing as I coded them, so I need to put in a level based difficulty structure. Looking at videos of the arcade, this seems fairly simple: tank speed, robot speed, dig speed, pit speed and missile drop rate. So I just need to parameterise those, and tie them into the level transition. It also has a kill screen on level 12, where the speed becomes too fast to complete. So I'll be aiming to reproduce that.
3) The arcade also has a second rock layout on alternate levels.
4) Sound effects.

And that's it. Oh, and I want to make the font a little more arcadey.

A cheat mode might help as well, since I'm too rubbish to get very far in the game!

[uglifruit]

Flipping heck this is going well/quickly!
Hats off to you!

[Dr_Dave]

Well, I think I'm pretty much done!

https://youtu.be/YQeyKqAeEaY?t=127

If you scoot back to the beginning of the video, you can see the loading screen in all it's colour clashing glory.

Progress:

- Added difficulty curve, which hopefully tops out at level 12 (I don't know, I can't get past level 5!)
- Added two players
- Added arcade font
- Added sound effect
- Added loading screen
- Bug fixed!

If you want to give it a go, grab it from my github: https://github.com/davetansley/thepitspectrum (link in the readme). Warning, it will probably have bugs

So, first venture in assembly and game development in general... Overall, it was a load of fun! I got quite obsessed with it for a while there, and loved seeing the thing come together.

Coding for the Spectrum feels finite, you know? Like you could one day master it. This is totally different to modern languages and systems, the mastery of which seems a folorn hope at best. And the process gave me a newfound respect for 80s coders, especially those who were involved in arcade conversions. I can't even begin to imagine how frustrating it must have been to debug code without modern tools, and I do wonder just how they managed to replicate coinop mechanisms so well without MAME running in a window beside them!

Biggest frustrations? Once I got over the conceptual difficulty of assembly language coding, I think the sound was the thing that annoyed me the most. Realising just how limited the 48k beeper is and how creative you need to be to get it to something interesting (not to mention the effect on game speed!)

Finally, porting The Pit made me realise just how much of an annoying game The Pit actually is! So many peculiar design decisions (most of which I've tried to replicate faithfully!) and frustrating little control quirks... I guess what I'm trying to say is, "don't blame me!"

[andydansby]

Congratulations on your game release. Looking good.

[Dr_Dave]

OM actual G he's only gone and done it. Wowsers.

Would love to see it get polished up a bit in time by yourself or someone else (the diamond cave is much too easy and the monster pool is extremely hard to escape from), but that's just a phenomenal feat for a first game, from scratch to release in a single month. My dream of a Speccy Pit has finally come true. All kudos to you, sir

Yeah, the difficulties are things that can be tweaked. To be honest, I've played through the same level so many times, I'm almost blind to what's hard and what's not now. Going to step back from it, let a few people play it, then adjust in coming weeks. Luckily it's all just numbers I can fiddle with that control the missile drop rate or the trap withdraw speed.

[Dr_Dave]

The actual trap withdraw speed is fine, it's just that the player movement is a little twitchy/gluey so it's hard to get it right with the required precision. (Maybe partly down to having 48K sound rather than 128?) I can do the coin-op blindfold but it took me about 100 lives to escape the first level.

Hah! Now, I can't even do the arcade trap room repeatedly, so it felt perfectly accurate to me

I think I could probably do with toning down the left-right motion, which, as you say, is too twitchy. Will have a look at it.

[Frankie]

Nice, have played this a lot, and got a good score on the arcade version on MARP

[Dr_Dave]

Just to bookend this thread from before the world went crazy...

I was flicking through the new Crash Annual other day when I saw a familiar sight...




I can't tell you how chuffed I was to see this! I remember reading Crash Christmas specials back in the mid-80s, wondering would it would be like to make a game and get it reviewed, and here it is

A new year is coming up... maybe time to dust off that hard-won Z80 knowledge and try something else?

[MarkRJones1970]

I remember reading somewhere that there was some info that The Pit may have been written by the Stamper Brothers? Has this been proved or disproved? Or am I just imagining it?