The New Dimension

30th April 2005: Level 2 - just got started

After sorting out some sub routines from last week, I progressed on today with the second level of Sub Hunter, which is a Sea Wolf style mode. The first thing that I done was loaded up Relaunch 64 and I worked on with the next lot of IRQ rasters. Since the second level does not want any scrolling, of any kind, just a static screen. The trouble was now, that the colour settings were slightly messed up inside the new rasters. So I decided to fix everything.

Once the two raster splits inside IRQ were all correct. My next task was to implement some level 2 code for the player. For level 1, the player can move up, down, left and right and shoot weapons across the screen to the left. However for this mode, I just want the player to fire missiles downwards (Like in a normal Sea Wolf style of game) and the player can only move left or right. So I programmed a little routine to check what playing mode is being used in the game, and called a new routine which will only allow the player control to be changed in the Sea Wolf stage. :o)

Once I have got that routine up and running correctly, I had to get those enemy subs moving across the screen. Well, this seems to work quite nicely, but there is still a whole lot more work to be added on to this level.

An early stage/test of level 2. Not right there at the moment. Still that can be fixed

20th May 2006: Up and away

Yeah, I know, the past few weeks I just couldn't be asked to get on with this game project. Erm well, I didn't feel motivated enough to work hard on it. Well, now I am back in action, still working on level 2 for this game. Actually it is not looking all that bad to be honest :) The sea wolf style stage seems to be working quite well. However, I need to fix the player's depth charge. What's going on there then? Well, the player seems to be shooting its depth charge upwards instead of downwards. :oD. Anyway, this should be easy enough to fix.

Now that I got the bullet to move downwards. I had come across another problem. The first shot, the depth charge will go downwards all the way, but after the second shot, the depth charge gets stuck in the middle. Now what could be the cause for this problem? Ha, I found the problem. I used the incorrect variable value, as it was already being used by a different variable, so I made a new variable, using a byte table. :)

The next thing for me to do is randomize the new starting positions for the enemy subs, using a random position table. Which of course should be easy enough. All I would need to do is create a new y position for the enemy sub, after it leaves the screen by reading it from a data table. :)

Well, I have been working on the enemy random y position routine. The loops and that seem to work. but the enemies seem to overlap each other now and then. So I'm going to have to do some tweaking to the random position table, so that there is no overlapping of the enemies. Well, I have sort of fixed this problem, but the random positions for the enemies is still crap. So I need to play around with the data tables even more that I get a more positive result.

6th June 2006 - The Omen Strikes Richard and tells him to get on with it!

Well, 6/6/06 eh? The omen strikes and shouts "Why is Sub Hunter not finished when it should have been a year ago as a 2 week project". Ahem, I just could not help making that up. Well, things have been pretty tough the past 2 weeks, since 20th May 2006. Or should I say, I could not have been asked to do more Sub Hunter work and did other things, like DMC V5.0 Music Album #5, and got stuck on the Internet. How flipping lazy eh? Nothing too exciting on the Internet at the moment.

Yesterday I realized that there was an unanswered email, which I should have replied to Frank. So I read carefully what he had to say and we both come up with some ideas. The first thing was that on level 2 the player is not supposed to drop any missile sprites. The player suppose to drop the spinning mine sprites. So this will be my task for today.

However, another idea is that, to rescue divers. The player must drop depth charges on to five different enemy subs. While the sea is being invaded by deadly fish. Hmm, maybe I should introduce the snappy crabs for this stage, rather than fish. The depth charge will be falling slowly and the enemy subs will go moderately fast across the screen while those crabs are moving across the screen on a slower basis. If the player hits a crab, maybe it can score 100 points, and double the score for an enemy sub. Also after 5 enemy subs are hit, a diver could swim across to the player's sub. If the player bombs a crab (As they wont be deadly) a life will be lost.

8th June 2006 - A different idea

I had an email back from Frank regarding the ideas. He had a new idea where after 30 seconds, if you hit a certain amount of enemy subs, a diver can come on screen and swims past, resulting to the diver being rescued. However, if you don't hit enough subs within a certain amount of time, a diver comes halfway across the screen, then an enemy sub kills it. Blood thirsty huh?

13th June 2006 - Unlucky for the subs!

Well, pushed myself to do some more game programming. First of all, after reading Frank Gasking's email, I agreed to changing the bullet sprite into a spinning mine looking depth charge, which worked out nicely. It looks big and bulky, but looks really great in the game. Next, I created the enemy sub to bullet collision, which worked out nicely. After that I had to add an explosion routine, which this time was put into the player bullet's sprite. Looks quite nice and turning into a proper game. I embedded the score routine three times, so that the player can score more points in this round. Finally I expanded the random y-positions for the enemy sprites after they leave the screen. There is still a bit more work to do before this level is finished but I know for certain the second stage is indeed 85% finished.

17th June 2006 - Fishing Techniques

I received an email from Frank, earlier on the week, where he suggested that I should change the enemy subs to fish and also alter any fish sprite of my own choice for this level. The depth charges were incorrect as well. They should have not been the spinning mines, they really should have been a bomb type of sprite. So I made some major corrections to this. The second thing was to get those fish animated, which I have done. Now next thing for me to do is to move the oxygen counter and turn it into a 30 second clock. Well, it was quite awkward at first then afterwards I managed it. Pleasing results.

What do I need to do next? Well, straight forward. I need to fix up the sprite random positions, as for some reason only three or four sprites are on the game screen. Something, which I certainly will need to take a look at. My other task will be to create the diver saved intro or diver not saved intro, for this level. But for now, I treat you to a screen shot of what has been done today.

And here it is, level 2.

I've had a reply this evening that so far the work is looking good, however, would be cool to see the fish bobbing up and down in form of sinus, to make things more interesting. Secondly the enemy fish die explosion - the fish bones effect looks cool on the fishes going to the right, but fishes going to the left, the fish bones are the same, so maybe I will need to sacrifice one or two sprite types to have the fish bone effect for fishes from the right of the screen, or maybe I should use those exploding bubbles again.

6th August 2006 - Putting two levels together for the first time

Because of the hard work made on both levels, although level 2 is not yet finished, but will be soon, I thought that I should combine the two levels together and play through the game to see how well it would work out. Well it seems to me that after adding a few more routines to put both levels together, the game seems to be working out slightly nice in a kind of way. I had to code routines to compare a value of the level counter, so that both stages got linked correctly with the correct background.

The second thing that I have done is made a couple of alterations with level 2. There seems to be a case where the pink fish is not bobbing correctly, due to a problem with the animation frame data table. The alteration to the enemy fish 3 frames look quite funny, but at least it is not bobbing in a one direction frame :oD

9th August 2006 - A bit of tweaking with the level complete stage

No Internet access today, due to technical difficulties. I suppose I could have used the Laptop downstairs to access Internet, but what the heck. There's nothing to exciting for me to look at at the moment. Probably no new news related to my hobbies on the C64, so I asked myself "What shall I do tonight, being that I have no Internet on my bro, Philip's PC?" Well, either muck around with the Shoot Em Up Construction Kit, Pinball Construction kit, or do more on Sub Hunter. Well, you don't really want me to muck around with a games creator and create silly crap which people would loathe. Instead, I got on with the Sub Hunter project. So then, what's happened this time?

I felt that the Level Complete phase did not look that good. So I thought I should adjust this problem, by making the player ship automatically move from its current position, and then make the player move the way it should have in the first place. This is where the player will move from where it was after rescuing the last diver, and then the sub moves up, until it reaches another position. Then the player's sub makes its exit by zooming across the screen to the left. This kind of movement reminds me of when you complete a level in Blitz 2000, where the player ship slowly moves up and then fly off the screen.

The second thing which I have done was added a routine that counts the amount of fish being shot in level 2. This is where this part of the game is very important. The sea wolf style stage plan is to give you 30 seconds to bomb a certain amount of deadly fish before time is up. Our way of solving this puzzle is something like this.

IF (FISH AMOUNT = 5) THEN
          DIVER SAVED = DIVER SAVED + 1 (MAKE DIVER MOVE ACROSS SCREEN AND LIVE)
          IF DIVER SAVED = 5 THEN
                LEVEL COMPLETE (DO USUAL LEVEL COMPLETE BITS)
          END IF
ELSE
          DIVER GETS KILLED BY A DEADLY FISH (OOER)
END IF

Or something like that LOL!

Well, I got that to work. All I need to do now is to program the interlude for each part of this stage, depending on whether or not a diver is rescued, or whether the grey fish moves across the screen and eats the diver alive, thus punishing the player to lose one of its lives.

19th August 2006 - Finishing touches to level 2

There were still some odd bugs in level 2 which had less fish flying across the screen, because of the start positions. I fixed this and now all is working fine. Once I fixed this problem of getting the two extra fish back on to the screen, I worked on the phase complete stage. This is where enough fish have been shot, resulting to a small interlude where a diver swims across the screen safely and then adds a diver saved to the indicator. Looks good. I reset the clock and everything for the game to continue, until all 5 divers have been rescued. Then the player zooms off screen and the level complete message appears.

After this is done, I worked on the lose a life part. Well at the moment nothing but an explosion on the player's ship. Although it probably would have been better if I added another interlude sequence where the diver swims half way across the screen and a speeding baby shark eats the diver, then the player explodes and loses a life.

27th August 2006 - Music Maestro

New music has been created exclusively for this game by Drax/Maniacs of Noise (Thanks Thomas). I checked out the music and I was very impressed with it. The title music, in game tune, high score/end tune, level complete jingle and game over jingle was really cool. I listened to all the tunes in the JCH Music Driver, and then used the Splitter program to relocate the tune to $8000. Once that was done, I loaded up all my code and implemented the new music into the game project. At first I had a crash in the game. Whoops, the music was still trying to play at $1003, but after realizing this, I changed the JSR $1003 to JSR $8003 and all worked nicely. So now I have updated the Sub Hunter team status!

28th August 2006 - Level 2 is ready

What a brilliant day it has been today for the Sub Hunter project. First of all, I noticed a couple of the game's bugs that require a fix up. Where after the player dies, losing a life the player can't drop a depth charge after a short delay. That wasn't meant to happen, so I looked at the player's death code and implemented a routine to say that the fire button has been reset. After assembling and testing this problem, the problem had been resolved. The second task was to kill off the two LL sprites that had appeared on screen after level 2 was complete (Where the sub moves off screen). All I needed to do was 'zero' the Y-position of all enemy sprites while the player was moving off screen on level completion.

After the bug fixing was complete, I made a change to the amount of fish that have to be killed on this level to 10. And 3 divers to save in this round. Now I e-mail the work done so far to Frank Gasking to have a look. Still a good result for 2 levels so far, and later on this week I will be working on level 3 - The Lunar Lander round. Whoopee! :oD

6th September 2006 - Level 3 under development

Well because of successfully finishing level 2, I got straight on to working level 3 for this game project (The lunar lander stage). I have not really done much today as the PC keeps on crashing, but I managed to get some work done. It is better to start something rather than not bother doing anything at all. I added a few routines into the game code where I can add level 3's IRQ routines to the main IRQ routine. Selected the correct level screen graphics display, and then displayed the screen. The colour settings looked bad, so I had to keep playing around with the IRQs until I had what I wanted. My next task will be to add the y positions for each sprite inside each split, which should hopefully be easy enough :D

19th September - Raster trickery
Well I did not really do much today, but at least I got on with the project :D. I been setting up the positions of the raster splits so that I can display more than 8 sprites. It's done easy :)

20th September - building another engine
After last night's raster play. I started to code additional routines for the lunar lander stage. First of all, I got more than 8 sprites on display, then started to move them across the screen successfully :) Nice. Now the sprites looked a bit wrong apart from the player. So it was time for me to create a new enemy sprite table for the squids and the crabs. I also set up the colours for the stage as well. I added more to the animation routine, to set up those frames for the enemies and then test run the program. Looks neat.

Now I had sprite animation for the enemies, it is now time for me to start the main game body. First of all the player ship had to be repositioned. Secondly I had to add a new routine, which put some kind of gravity on the player's ship, so that it is gradually sinking down to the ground. Now that is working out quite nice, although a tad on the slow side. Maybe I should decrease the gravity delay slightly for the player ship to be pulled to the ground slightly faster.

My next step is to create the waving man, which the player has to rescue. I had problems here because for some reason the guy who you should rescue, seems to be disappearing. One quick fix and he's there no problem. Weird :) I'll just send Frank the work done so far.

To make things more interesting, take a look at the picture below :)

21st September 2006 - Level 3, Crashes and Frustration

I had an email from Frank regarding the background colour in level 3. He preferred the colour of those purple lines to be black. So the first thing I have done is turned those purple lines into black lines.

Most of today I have been working on level 3 of the Sub Hunter level 3. The first thing I done was checked what had been done so far. I had trouble with the player to diver collision, so I had to make minor adjustments to the code, where when the player rescues the diver and must take it to the surface, the sub turns pink :) This is to indicate that you're carrying a diver in the sub and that you have to go to the top of the screen. As well as this after a player reached the surface with the diver on board. Another one randomly drops to the bottom, and the player has to rescue this one as well. 2 divers rescued lights up a diver in the panel on the bottom right.

There was a flashing cursor that spoiled the game, this was mainly because I used a poke which activated the flashing cursor by using the poke code as a variable. Wrong move. So I fixed this problem, created a temporary title screen and headed on to finishing the second half of level 3.

I worked on the player/enemy collisions, which at first were bugged. The collisions were incorrect, so I used a flashing border to check the collision to see if it was working. It took a couple of hours of tweaking until the sprite collisions were fixed 100%. Now I could implement the player losing a life into the game. Once that was done, I had to tweak the level 3 sprite display rasters, as there were two sprites in the wrong place. They were overlapping each other.

Now that this problem was fixed I tried to add a detection routine where the amount of lives is checked after level completion. Bad move unfortunately because it put me into a panic. The program kept crashing, I tried to debug the problem. I put a REM statement by the lives detection, and come across another problem. After 2 hours of panic and frustration I managed to pull myself together and get the game working again. Except for that level 3's Get Ready, Well Done, and Game Over displays funny. It is because of using fake multiplexors in level 3's IRQ routine. I'll try to fix this tomorrow :o)) Anyway, I saved the work and sent a new preview to Frank's Inbox.

This may look like less than 8 sprites, but actually this part uses 14 sprites.

22nd September 2006 - Nothing much

I just received an email from Frank saying that so far the game is perfect, but however he had some cool ideas for the game to make it *** fantastic ***. His ideas are top secret. I don't want to give too much away :D

5th October 2006 - The sinking feeling

Things have been looking great for me today. Not only did I have a good day at work, but Level 3 has shaped up really nicely as well. I thought I should get on with this project today because of nothing else to do, on a cold wet evening in Solihull :o(. Anyway I had an email from Frank a couple of weeks ago where I had to update the game engine slightly. I disabled the up and down controls for the player. This is because during play, the player will automatically descend to the ground and stop (to collect the diver) and then automatically go back up again. This is where the real challenge meets. I also tweaked the speed of the creatures that you have to avoid during game play. The last thing I done was fixed the IRQ problem for displaying Get Ready, Well Done and Game Over. :)

I could say this project should hopefully be ready in time for Christmas 2006. :) Can't promise though. But that is the date I'm aiming to get it finished. Then 2007, to Cronosoft.

15th October 2006 - More of the sinking feeling

I received an email from Frank that he has some ideas which would make Level 3 look even more fantastic, so I took notice of what Frank wrote and worked a little more on the level 3 game code.

First of all I had to code a routine which would not allow the player to start sinking to the ground, unless the fire button is pressed. Secondly, make the player pull down, only when the sub is going down. Then push up, when the sub is going up. Once a diver has been rescued, or the player loses a life, all functions are reset therefore the player will have to press fire to release the sub again.

This level also has a more challenge. The player will not be able to move left or right, if they pull the joystick up or down, therefore game play is more hard, but level 3 is possible to complete :)

On to level 4.

16th October 2006 - Level 4 gets started

I have not been very well today, so I have been taking a rest from work at my job. Later on in the day I felt slightly better and started working on level 4. At the moment, level 1 sprites are in level 4. But as soon as I am very well, I will be working on the main game engine for the jelly fish attack stage. My aim for this stage is to use a combination of a long sinus wave for each of the jellyfish that come across the screen. Of course, the difficulty factor would have to be more difficulty, compared to the last 3 levels. More on this update, next time I carry on with this game project. Off to watch some demos now :o)

26th October 2006 - Jellyfish and ice cream (Yeah, right)

Thursday nights usually suck, so I thought I would do more Sub Hunter work today. First of all I loaded up Sprite Pad, and calculated the value (in C64 memory) for where the level 4 sprites are going to be placed. Well, this time round for this level I wanted to add the purple jellyfish and the grey sea horses. So I looked at the starting and finishing position for each frame for the sprite. Then I worked out the values for the enemy sprite animation. In the SUBH.ASM file, I added some data lines to create the animation and also some pointers for where the animation is set. Next I opened STAGE4.ASM and deleted the Level 1 attack patterns and worked on the main attack patterns for level 4. The enemy sprites will be moving across the screen. Hell, that is just boring for a harder level, so I added some routines to move those enemies up and down at two different speeds.

While testing, there was still a problem with the sprite movement. When the enemies were going up and down, the sprite visibility seems to keep switching off. I had to set the direction limit slightly higher for the top position of the screen, before reversing the direction and also vice versa. Now the level is starting to look good. However, there was still another problem. Some of the sprites are moving up and down way too slow. Which looked incredibly boring, so I altered the routine slightly and the enemies are now moving up and down slightly faster than before. Nice :o) This project is getting near to 50% completion, but there is still a lot more work to be done before I release this game to the public. (Where my target is Christmas day, else later on in the New Year).

Monday 30th October 2006 - Level 4 collision and scoring

It was a cold and dark evening, so I thought that I work more with Sub Hunter. Not a bad idea huh? I needed to program in the player bullet to enemy sprite collision. Which was simple enough. I tested the collision to see if it worked, by changing the border on screen to another colour, depending on which sprite was hit. Something like this:

Enemy sprite 1 collision = white border
Enemy sprite 2 collision = red border
Enemy sprite 3 collision = cyan border
Enemy sprite 4 collision = purple border
Enemy sprite 5 collision = green border

I tested this method and all 5 sprites' collision detection with the bullet worked nicely. So now all I had to do is implement the explosion animation for the enemies for after they are hit by the player and call the score routine to give the player some more points. Well, this has
worked nicely.

The second thing, I tried level 4 out. This particular level was too easy to complete, so I had to do the odd bit of tweaking to make this level hard, but of course possible to complete. The enemies now move slightly faster, and the player has to make the correct timing to collect enough divers for this level. Just like level 1, if a diver gets shot, you get punished by some oxygen on the counter being took off. Now I pass this level to Frank to check out. :o)

Tuesday 31st October 2006 - Level 4 tweaks

Nothing much, I only needed to tweak the enemy sprites, using Sprite pad and ACME. I flipped the Jellyfish the opposite direction, as the jellyfish looked as if they were swimming the wrong way. I also slowed down the animation slightly too. :o))

Wednesday 8th November 2006 - Slow 'em down

I had an email from Frank Gasking, regarding the level 4 attack waves. His response was that level 4 was just too hard to play, therefore I should make this level somewhat easier by slowing down the enemy attack waves slightly. So today, despite my dreaded cold flu virus (hopefully getting better) I did a little more on the game by slowing the enemies x-axis down. It is simple.

The second thing is that I have discussed to Frank via email about how level 5 (Shark attack) could work. Where I mentioned that on level 5, the player will be facing the big shark, and will have to defeat the evil shark to complete the level. Also the idea is to have some of the small sharp toothed fish swimming across, to slow you down with the shark attack. This sounds to me, pretty interesting. Hope so :o)) A late level of the Shark Attack stage will feature 2 sharks to defeat, and the final shark attack will feature 3 sharks to defeat. Should be fun :o))

Saturday 11th November 2006 - Speed 'em up

Well, I received an Email from Frank, asking me to speed up the enemies slightly. The other thing I also had to do was to add a routine to make a swimmer die, if an enemy touches it. This is to make game play harder and more interesting. Frank and I also have been discussing about how the Shark Attack stage should work. I wont tell you about it today. Just wait until you hear about the Shark Attack stage, as soon as I work on it (hopefully tomorrow). You will just have to wait and see :)

Sunday 12th November 2006 - A new cave

I have been very busy this afternoon. I have got started with level 5. It was a right pain in the ass. Before I worked on the main IRQ routines for this level. I worked on some routines which will scroll the chars of the cave. The cave's scroller is going to be different compared to the previous levels. Instead of using 6 layers to scroll 8 layers had to be used. So I typed in quite a long listing to scroll the background rough, before I was able to implement to IRQ smooth scroll.

Now the rough char screen scroll was working, I worked on the IRQ multiple rasters. You'll probably understand how much I really HATE raster coding. Especially when it comes to timing those blasted things. Once I created the multiple IRQ rasters, I implemented the smooth scroll variables to each raster. Now we have a nice scrolling cave. Looks nice despite there are still some bugs in the code. Timing of rasters always have been my worst enemy.

Monday 13th November 2006 - Level idea

Frank revealed a new idea of this Shark Attack level which can make my coding life a whole lot easier, as I am unable to create more than 8 sprites for this level (Due to lack of raster time left in the machine code). When he replied to me, his idea was that there can be one player, and 3 large sharks and a baby shark (that bobs up and down like level 1). The idea of this level will be to avoid the onslaught of sharks within a certain amount of time. The higher the level, the more time you have to dodge those sharks. Easier for me, and should still give game players a whole lot of fun.

Saturday 25th November 2006 - Level 5 joys and woes and sharks

I have got started to do more of level 5. However, there is still a bug in the IRQ raster, regarding expanded sprites positions but I shall leave this until later on, when the main game engine has finished. The second thing is that level 5's parallax scrolling has a bad scroll routine with the last layer of cave at the very bottom of the screen. So now I am going to have to fix this, before I start working on the main game engine - The onslaught of sharks. I fixed it no problem. However there is still a problem with the bottom layer. The chars just wont scroll across smoothly, but I can sort this out later on this week.

After getting rid of the test colours inside $D020 (The border colours), I created some data tables for the shark animation. The shark's animation are split into four different parts to form the big sprites. The first is the shark's face, facing right, and the other half of the first shark is the back and tail. There are also another two data tables for me to create the frames for those sprites. Those are the same as the first two sprites, but this time the enemy sprites face the opposite direction.

Now that I have created the sprite data tables, it was time for me to put those sharks in place and move them. Now that they're moving straight and loop in the same area. My next task was to reposition the enemy sprites to a new position by using the same randomizer routine as I have done for level 1. Now those sharks are moving and repositioning the way I liked them to position.

However, I still feel that those enemies could do with moving up and down slightly but I'll ask Frank and show him what I have done.

I also added a 60 seconds clock, which is similar to the Sea Wolf style stage (Level 2). The clock is there for a purpose. When the player is playing level 5, they have to survive for 60 seconds, from the almighty onslaught of the deadly sharks.

Here's a screen shot of level 5 :)

Monday 4th December 2006 - Monday night TV vs Sub Hunter

Bah! Monday night television really sucks, so I decided to work on Sub Hunter even more (Which is more on the plus side ;o))). I worked on with level 5, fixing some odd problems or so. Level 5's Shark Attack stage required a few alterations, where I needed to change the last big shark and the bullet sprites into baby sharks (As you can see below). The small sharks swim faster, compared to the large sharks. The difficulty level for this stage is now just about right.

There is still one problem that I needed to deal with. One of the layers of the bottom cave would not scroll properly after the player push fire on the Get Ready prompt, therefore the top layer of the bottom cave was stuck. There was a problem in the routine, so I tried merging it inside the same routine as the last layer of cave on the upper cave. I deleted one of the useless IRQs and hey presto, the parallax scrolling worked out nicely. I tested the game on level 5 and I found that it is hard to play, but it is possible to complete. Level 5 is roughly finished, so I'll send an email with the work done, over to Frank Gasking to see what he thinks of it.

.... To be continued.