Spring Clean!

Long time no see, and all that!  Sorry, I've been meaning to update this dev. log for a while now, but haven't quite found the time what with everything else going on.  Oh well, here we are now.

So it's week 118 or something since the game was started, and I've largely been doing lots of cleaning and housekeeping to the code base over the last few months.  I managed to find a couple of data compressors which were better than I had been using, so I've converted over to using one of them, and so reduced the footprint of the graphics by about 4K.  I've also re-written how some of the map data is being stored, which has saved another 1.8K.  These might seem like small gains, but they're actually quite huge in the world of a 128K game.  Obviously, as with all memory savings, they don't seem to last for long, and I've already use some of it for extra content - unique weapon graphics for each player to fire, new room graphics (stained-glass windows and such), both closed & open versions of the main door to the mansion, and Zouch the Witch's quest can now be completed, so along with Sir Stamperlot that's half of the characters with completable quests! Woo hoo!

Aside from that there's been a some pesky bugs to track down, a few of which I've now fixed - the game is stable again, but I'm sure there's some circumstances which would continue to cause crashes, I just haven't found them yet.  I can now play through both the completable quests without issue though, which is a relief.  I was going to post a video of one such crash, as it was quite spectacular in the Spectrum way of filling the screen with random colours and graphics, but when it was being recorded it would instead just reset the machine in a boring way.  Isn't there a psychology theory about something which is being watched behaving in different way exactly because it's being watched?  Anyway, managed to nail that bug, so all is well.

The PC version of the game is apparently now at about 90% complete.  My version isn't that far ahead - I'm always playing catch-up with them anyhow - but I would put it at about 70%.  There still a lot to code, and lots of optimising after that, and I'm certain that I'll run out of memory soon enough and have to re-jig everything again, but I'm feeling much more like I'm nearing the end rather than leaving the beginning.

p.s. Okay, so I did do something else over the last few months - that being converting the excellent Pico8 game ‘Steps’ to the ZX81. It was great little project and lots of fun to do.  For more details see https://bobs-stuff.itch.io/steps