Spectrum Computing

Playing with compression routines on the laptop at the moment, to see if I can afford to include some static screen images in BunnyGun. Or just how much will fit into 48K in general. I think I'll be moving to 128K for the game after that. I'd like to stick to 48K but the screen-paging of the 128K offers a lot more opportunities for multicolour. And I've already done some great new sprite designs for that, saved on my DS.

Not done much work on the game itself as I need to spend time clearing up the house and moving things into storage. I need to move all the furniture clear of the radiators so I can get someone in to replace them and the boiler, since I haven't had any central heating for a while now. Getting by with electric radiators and the immersion heater in the water tank.

I've also got an idea I might try cut-down versions of games to run off ROM cartridges. Maybe when I've finished Go-Go BunnyGun, make something like a 2-minute high-score 'caravan' shooter version of it for 16K ROM. I'm still trying to think of a project that could fit in a 16K ROM but really take advantage of the 48K RAM for some sort of effect. And I don't mean just to unpack a compressed game, but something that can only be done with a lot of RAM. All I can think of is a lot of pre-shifted scrolling. But I would want to get some good parallax effects out of that as a minimum.

Joefish wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2019 6:36 pm Not done much work on the game itself as I need to spend time clearing up the house and moving things into storage. I need to move all the furniture clear of the radiators so I can get someone in to replace them and the boiler...

A multicolour Sokoban variant just waiting to happen.

PeterJ wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2019 6:14 pm

bobs wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2019 5:12 pm Bringing the hugely detailed isometric PC game “Melkhior’s Mansion” to the humble 128k
(See my Twitter/Facebook for more details)

Any chance of further updates on your development tutorial blog. I used to really enjoy reading those. Pretty please!

I should be resuming those after Melkhior’s is finished - that’s taking the priority right now. It is giving me lots to write about though

I've got so many half-baked ideas on the go it's terrible. I usually start off using AGD, telling myself that I'm only sandboxing, and then never get around to finishing them off. I'm not going to mention the projects that have a decent chance of completion soonish (one of them doesn't even use AGD!), but here are some others on the back burner.



Clockwise from top left:

-An adventure game involving reassembling a Speccy and peripherals.
-Boris makes Borsch. Title sums it up really!
-A platform game in which you need to fix a lawnmower. In this case you push the spark plug at the top, down to the lawnmower at the bottom.
-A shameless Cybernoid rip-off.

Slowly working on a Spectrum Next game called The Next Space Janitor - it's an asteroids clone but with space junk

After that I want to work on my first sprite based game on the original Spectrum. It's a clone of Berzerk but with the Currah MicroSpeech (which was why I was asking about the asm code earlier this year). I have seen Horace and the Robots but that hasn't put me off doing a clone regardless. It'll teach me a lot more anyhow!

First thing is first though and that is to finish the Spec Next game!

namco wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2019 9:37 pm Slowly working on a Spectrum Next game called The Next Space Janitor - it's an asteroids clone but with space junk

Are there any screenshots knocking about? I'm interested to see how people are using the expanded features.

R-Tape wrote: ↑Fri Nov 01, 2019 8:34 am

namco wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2019 9:37 pm Slowly working on a Spectrum Next game called The Next Space Janitor - it's an asteroids clone but with space junk

Are there any screenshots knocking about? I'm interested to see how people are using the expanded features.

Not much atm as I'm getting used to the system but here's my "dev blog/notes" with some gif captures via twitter

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23zxspect ... ery&f=live

I don't know if it qualifies since I'm not writing a game for the Speccy, but instead recreating old games in 3D. The intention is to have one big game, with each level being a different Speccy game. So far I have about 5 levels created. Here's a very short video of the Gulpman level:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3DsdoJWJhA

Turtle_Quality wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2019 12:21 pm Very slowly writing a block dropping game, writing a library of code for that.

Any screenshots?

Ralf wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2019 2:11 pm I have a lot of unfinished projects, some over 10 years old
I guess the best way for me to finish them would be being fired from my work and being unemployed for a longer time

But I hope this year to finish some small logical game for Xmas. And maybe make some game mod.

I remember the screenshots you showed us couple of years ago and some of them were really intriguing, hoping that you can manage to complete some of them Glad that you did Larry recently, I have to dive deep in there soon.

Having disassembled / reverse-engineered Quadron's code last year to prepare it for release (the original source was lost), I realised I've now got a good bunch of routines that would form a pretty solid starting point for a new game.

So I've been tinkering on and off modifying and enhancing some of my original code (which I find fun in itself ) and writing some new graphics effects routines as I build up a collection to be used in a forthcoming game. No real game design yet. And no tools to create assets yet either - they were lost too. But I do know I want it to be fast moving and smooth!

In the meantime, just been jotting down gameplay ideas as they emerge.

Eek! It's been kind of a year since my first spectrum release.
My follow up is also multiple choice interactive fiction. It's got a wrestler who encounters a UFO belonging to Dracula whilst on his way to the opening ceremony of a jumble sale. I got the first chapter playable in the summer. I'm going for a multiload thing this time and it's multiple times bigger than my first. I like that it's more substantial but I think I've gone to far, and its too big! I need to be getting projects finished and moving on to the next thing.

[media]https://twitter.com/i/status/1157754319569137669[/media]

This year I've also gotten really into art that's made with a fixed font of text characters. So I've redone my code to handle this. I've got rudimentary compression system that skips over repeating characters. Doing interactive fiction meant I could get up and running on my first asm project. As I'm getting more into it, I'm learning the strengths and weaknesses of the machine. And this year I've done experiments with animation using attributes but not changing the characters as this allows updating the screen much faster. I can see real potential here for doing game stuff but at the moment I'm sticking to the project in hand.


[media]https://twitter.com/i/status/1171422822226255878[/media]

I don't post here often but I am still plugging away on speccy stuff. thanks everyone

chip-fork wrote: ↑Sat Nov 02, 2019 1:21 pm ...It's got a wrestler who encounters a UFO belonging to Dracula whilst on his way to the opening ceremony of a jumble sale.

Tsk. Hackneyed.

(Sounds great, and looks amusing)

I like the look of your ATTR animations. I've been looking at something similar, but I didn't use background chars like that. It gives it a haywire appearance that adds to it. It sounds like you're busy, but if you ever found time to submit a demo to this year's Woot Tape Magazine it would be very welcome.

I post it in twitter occasionally, but I will also post a screen here.
That's a WIP version of remake of the Cell 3326 game, a small adventure/quest.


Most probably will come out during the next year.

[mention]moroz1999[/mention] nice graphics, they remind me of an updated Laser Squad.

Very nice graphics Moroz. Good work with colours, shadows, bright and non bright. I wish I could draw like that

Thanks guys! That's indeed heavily influenced by Laser Squad, because the original Cell 3326 uses a really similar style, and I wanted to keep it.
Anybody can draw like that. When I started working on game graphics for Crystal Kingdom Dizzy Remake, I was only able to adapt what I saw on Amiga's version, and I didn't do it perfectly.
One of the earliest mockups of CKD:


The key to the constant progress of skills was a countless trial and error. For example, this is how I did the ladders for CKD Remake:

Only one of them made it into the game, because I wasn't happy with the rest of them. And that's how everything was done, I just spend a lot of time on working on tiny details.
In total, CKD Remake took about 800-1000 hours of working on graphics. Then Wonderful Dizzy took about 300-400 hours (I wasn't alone this time ), and Cell 3326 took about 50-80 hours to make (114 tiles currently, not a large project).
I think anybody who spends ~1000 hours of working on graphics will achieve the similar result, if not better.

Thanks for showing those graphics examples, they're really quite inspiring.

Those attribute screens reminded me of an idea. Drawing screens with just a fixed character set of standard shapes, with attributes, and compressing loads and loads of them. Then adding clickable and changeable areas to the pictures, links from one scene to another, and a set of state variables that can affect the links. And making a whole Myst-type adventure like that.

Another idea was to take the Fairlight layout idea to an extreme to make a purely graphical adventure. Draw scenes with lines and fills and repeatable tiled images, so you get more natural outdoor landscapes, though still with that similar slightly overhead viewpoint. But do away entirely with the isometric aspect of moveable objects and compass controls, and just freely wander around the space available. Maybe use an engine that does the 'fills' temporarily in memory as a solid pixel mask, before applying the texture, and so just hang on to the last 'fill' mask to dictate where the player can move.

Similarly to the Myst idea above, you could simply place (visible or invisible) markers on the ground that act as triggers to move to another scene, or interact with a fixed object (e.g. talk to an NPC, unlock a door).

Instead of object manipulation in 3D, it would be an adventure of collecting and using objects. And maybe all the objects would be found in treasure chests, and can't be dropped, so you don't have to worry about in-game representations.

I like the look of your ATTR animations. I've been looking at something similar, but I didn't use background chars like that. It gives it a haywire appearance that adds to it. It sounds like you're busy, but if you ever found time to submit a demo to this year's Woot Tape Magazine it would be very welcome.

Thanks R-Tape
I like the shimmering. I also tried characters that are split in the middle which effectively doubles the resolution either horizontally or vertically. Whilst still only updating colour information.
It might be cutting it bit fine for this years tape. it's somehow November already! but I shall have a think about what I can come up with. Maybe next year if not. Thanks for the invite though.

I'm currently working on a fast compression routine, but at the current rate I'm going it will be another two years before it gets finished.

I also have some ideas for a sequel to ld-snake...

Two projects across four platforms so it's taking an age and I have so little time.

1. An arcade adventure based on a sci fi universe and presently dodgy enemy AI.

2. A multiplayer exploration game based on RS232 or TCP/IP connections between two or more computers with the gamestate held on GCP for the full massively multiplayer experience or a single RPI (up to 8 players) or RPI acting as a bridge.

1 is pretty much done bar decent graphics and debugging. Rewritten in C for portability with a few critical routines in assembly (using a script to plot the sprites as procedures from bitmaps, does the heavy lifting for me on all platforms).

2 is currently QL and Amiga (68k project) and very WIP but the server is written, tested, but Speccy version planned and I'm mainly reusing the code I wrote for 1 although not sure what interfaces to support - originally thought spectranet and zx networking from interface 1. More interested in 2. Hitting some serious bottlenecks on the QL with the baud rate during PoC phase so I need a Hermes chip.... apparently.

As I have a full time job in software and a young family I fear both are destined to amuse just me. But I still have hope!

Loads of other half finished software just to amuse the kids. All music free unfortunately because I don't have the first clue how to do that yet. Love the journey, not fussed enough about the destination.

ZxSpence wrote: ↑Wed Nov 06, 2019 9:05 pm Two projects across four platforms so it's taking an age and I have so little time.

1. An arcade adventure based on a sci fi universe and presently dodgy enemy AI.


1 is pretty much done bar decent graphics and debugging. Rewritten in C for portability with a few critical routines in assembly (using a script to plot the sprites as procedures from bitmaps, does the heavy lifting for me on all platforms).


As I have a full time job in software and a young family I fear both are destined to amuse just me. But I still have hope!

Loads of other half finished software just to amuse the kids. All music free unfortunately because I don't have the first clue how to do that yet. Love the journey, not fussed enough about the destination.

Any screenshots to feed the hype¿¿

Do you have any website where all those projects can be seen?

Thanks

No hype, not massive on self promotion. When something gets finished it gets released.

I think 2 will get finished first, we shall see. Pretty clear in what I wrote that it's difficult to be a completer finisher.

If I give up, I'll make the GitHub repos public.