Xerra's Blog

Drunken coder ramblings

Another quick update —

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last couple of months. I didn’t realise it had actually been this long since my last post on the #ParadroidRemake we’ve been working on for what seems like years now. In reality it really hasn’t actually been that long, but my partner and I have gone through the dreaded moving process, which meant all the equipment packed away, and all sorts of “more important things to do” than tinker on the computer as soon as my desk was setup again in the new house. And I do as I’m told 🙂

 

So I’m at the point where I consider the title screen stuff finished, bar adding in any controls to adjust options, which is going to depend on Aaron’s final design. What I’m currently doing, short of revisiting the transfer game, is waiting for the last big part of the game to go in.

 

Aaron is handling the major job of getting all the droids onto the maps, and moving about. I’ve been doing some play-testing with the latest build to see them in all their glory, but there’s a lot of AI work to get done before they actually behave like robots. At present they just sit there while you shoot them. Not exactly exciting gameplay there, at present.

 

Aaron is trying to do his best to emulate similar conditions in the game to how the droids worked on the original, thanks to some help from Andrew Braybrook himself, when he blogged a lot of very useful information after we asked him. If you’re not following him already on Twitter then look up @UridiumAuthor – and there’s also a link to his great blog in my sidebar.

 

Before going back to the transfer game, we decided that it would be fun for me to visit an old classic C64 game to do a conversion using just tiles as a learning exersize as he was on holiday anyway. So I’ve gone and had a go at Boulderdash – just for the hell of it. I plan to put up a proper post about my work on this along with some other stuff I’ve been doing as well over the last two months, as they deserve more than a quick paragraph. At present my conversion of the C64 original Boulderdash is around 95% complete so, as any game developer knows, I’m at the hard bit now where it’s got to all kick together.

 

True to Aaron’s conditions, I did indeed make the whole game run from just tiles. I’ll be putting it up here with my other games just as soon as it’s finished. Current deadline – imposed by my partner in crime – is end of this month so I’ve got five days left… Thanks for that !!!

 

I am quietly confident the game will be complete by then, if lacking in some polish, but I can always revisit at a later date to sharpen it up. I’m not looking to get sued either, so you lucky people get to play it for free, so I’m not getting any money from a game that still has new versions released by the original publisher themselves, every so often.

 

I also have a pretty good idea what game I’m going to do after I’m finished #ParadroidRemake and Boulderdash. More on that once these two projects are behind me, of course. Naturally it’s a remake of an old classic. As I love retro games and the challenge of recreating them. This time, however, it’ll be from the Vic 20 era, so again a chance to play with tiles as the Vic 20 had no sprites.

 

Finally, as you may have noticed, this site has been moved. We’ve moved away from the commercial side of our company for this work, as it’s non-profit making, so I’m using my own domain for my stuff. All the links and stuff should have been fixed here by now but feel free to report if there is something broken with the change.

 


Categorised as: Boulderdash | Development | Game Studio 2 | Paradroid | Website



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