Week 102

With the rewrite of the graphic system complete and working again I thought it best to get back to actually writing the game - and by that I mean the actual game-play elements of it.  Pretty much since the beginning of this project I've been juggling the memory requirements of the game vs the speed of it, and obsessing about the speed quite a lot.  I know it'll never be as fast as the original Atic Atac, but that's to be expected as this game is hauling around a huge amount of data on each frame.  For example, Sir Stamperlot is 41 pixels high by 24 pixels wide, and so that's 123 bytes of graphic data, which is then multiplied by 2 as the whole graphic is masked so it stands out against the background, so that's 246 bytes.  Compare that to the original game where the player is 16x16 pixels, and so only 32 bytes - that's over 7.5x as much data and a lot more time spent drawing it each frame.  But when I compare the game against other 3D games - Knightlore, Sweevo's (etc) I don't feel quite so bad - and this game arguably has more complicated backgrounds.

So to start that processes of making 'a game' I added the 'start up' sound and animation to it, where the player is given a countdown klaxon before they fade into the screen from foot to head.  That was shown in the video I posted on Twitter over the weekend, although strangely that klaxon sound doesn't quite match the original, despite using the same code... one to check at a later date!  It was a relatively easy thing to add, and makes the game seem more 'complete' somehow.  This week I want to add the similar 'death' sequence - where the play fades out again before restarting - and hopefully get a system in place so the 25+ objects in the game can be distributed around the map correctly - and possibly  hidden in chests.  I've already got an inventory system where those objects can be collected and dropped, and the system to support the food is also written so it can be eaten and restore some of that ever-decreasing health, so things are heading in the right direction again :)