New Stuff For Old Stuff :: Blog

R evival of the project, that is. It's not a resurrection-based game. Following a hiatus due to realising that my original concept was rubbish, I had a different idea. It's nothing particularly original; sideways scrolling, and the sheep following one another like a snake. There will be things to collect, and things to avoid. Avoiding the enemies will be more difficult, the more sheep are following the one you're controlling. The idea is that you start with one, and accumulate friends as you go along.  They may be dispatched by enemies, and there will be a maximum of four because of the way I've used two sprites to get hi-res with multicolour effect. There are no collectibles or enemies yet, but here's the basic action, which I'm really happy with. The sound you hear on the video is being played by a breadbin 64. It's my most recent tune for this game. The video is captured from VICE It was my first go with the 64's scrolling capability. I ...

I 'm finding it much easier to write silly tunes for my game than I am to write an actual game for my game. ( see the last post to see how far that's got and why it ground to a halt.) But I like composing and I'm getting my coding kicks from writing the assembly code to play the music  and developing my own app to convert the notation (via musicXML) into the data for my C64 music routine. It's doing repeats now, as you can see. The music you hear in this video is being played by a genuine breadbin C64. Thanks SID.  

P rogress with this project ground to a halt for two reasons; I found that I really enjoyed writing the music and have been doing a lot of that , and because when I got to the point where my characters were moving around, I realised that my original concept was rubbish. At first I'd seen a cross between Lemmings and Pacman - where the sheep would flock and also follow the character that you control. The idea was to try and lead them around obstacles and solve puzzles. After a break I had the idea of being able to switch character. Each has a name and a 'special skill' and you work out how to use the characters to solve the puzzle. The mechanics of that are kinda working, as you can see. It needs more characters, the ones that are there need more work. But most of all it needs some time spending designing some devious puzzles for this scenario. I'll probably take a break and write more music, and let this stew for a bit.

E arlier in the week I commented on Twitter that I was grateful to someone for mentioning that the Master contains a battery, because I didn't think anything I had in the attic had a battery inside. Well now I feel silly:  There it is.  Looks like we may have got away with it! There is leakage but it appears to be contained.  Shall I call Acorn and ask what part they would approve?  After a rudimentary clean, it's looking very nice indeed. The cartridge contains Wordwise Plus, as the f-key strip hints: I think I've been lucky not to have had to deal with alkali spills. But the computer is well-designed, even if any had got out, it would have been contained within the plastic of the case as long as the thing is stored at a reasonable angle. This job is essential when there are potentially 30-year-old batteries in there. It's important not to just replace the old pack with alkaline batteries, because the Master tries to charge them when switched on...

I 'd like to send thanks and kudos to icon64, the team behind Rocky Memphis - The Legend Of Atlantis. That's Stuart Collier, Trevor Storey and Saul Cross. I'm a great starter of games but not a great finisher. The short list of games that I've become obsessed with through to the end include Portal 1 and Day of the Tentacle. I'll spend days trying to figure out a puzzle and I don't like too much pixel-perfect-platform-jumping or battling enemies. Legend of Atlantis fits the bill perfectly. There have been similar games but for a native C64 game this looks and sounds so good and plays so well. The puzzles are perfect. You don't want them to be too obvious and just go through the motions. Nor do you want them to be impossible or unfair. In LOA you collect items as you go along (which aren't too easy to find because you can't see them on the screen and have to search) and you have to work out how those interact with devices you find in the room...

I  must mention that I'm very pleased to have taken delivery of this power brick which will power a C64 and a Vic20. I have a collection of Commodore power supplies (I'm sure we all do). It bothers me that they get hot, I can usually smell the one I've been using when it's been on for a while. I believe that there's also a risk of it failing and frying the board of a valuable computer. This one is from Electroware, aka c64psu.com . They're in Poland but the shipping was reasonable and quick. The item itself was very reasonable too, coming in at well under fifty quid with taxes and shipping. It doesn't run totally cool but gets as warm as any transformer you plug into the wall, because it has a regular step-down transformer for the 9vAC. For the 5vDC it has a modern switching circuit. They make a version that feeds your computer and your 1541, one that has the right connector for the C128 and one for powering an Amiga. They all come with a choice of...

I've made a little progress with my game, and I'm feeling a little more positive about the gameplay now. Here's evidence I have about three 'happy sheep ambling about' tunes now, and this is the reason that the game has been sidelined a little. Once I'd started to write music, that's all I wanted to do for a while. One of the pieces I started writing (there are many) is 'music for an imaginary spooky video game' which has just about made it out of the end of the pipeline. I did start to compose it for three voices with our friend the SID chip in mind, but it grew! This is the full orchestral version, MuseScore is doing a pretty good job of rendering the instruments, but as usual with these things, some instruments suck, particularly the brass. I've got as far as making a satisfactory version that runs on the C64. This involved quite a bit of programming, I first adapted Derek Morris's sound routine (which he says he's happy for ...