Tony Brice's Website

So finally I’m getting around to talk about the title screen work I’ve been doing over the last couple of months. In all I think there’s around 10 – 15 hours or so I’ve devoted to this part of the game since I shelved the transfer game to come back to it later.

Over a month without an update. I’ve been so busy with the new job that, while I’ve still been working on the game, I’ve not made time to blog about what I’m actually doing.

The Paradroid transfer game is actually turning out to be a bit of a bugger to get in place. After a couple of rewrites I’m actually going back to basics and putting the code together on paper to try and get a proper build routine for random maps. At present everything is switched off apart from the generation of walls on one side of the playfield circuits so they can be tested. And retested. And then retested again.

Sorry, I’ve been a bit quiet of late. Real life stuff slowing down my coding a bit but I’m still beavering away. Aaron’s been a lot busier so today I’ve been testing out all the droid info screens that he’s been plugging into the console. Now that these are in and working – just a few cosmetic changes to be made – the actual console part is almost finished. Aaron has the icon for statistics plugged in as well, which is something that the original game never actually had but got added by another coder years down the line, along with other improvements, when a lot more was known about the C64 hardware. Not to mention compression improvements allowing a lot more data to be held in memory. Quite how this will be setup is yet to be decided but it will probably get done once there’s proper gameplay running near the end, so that there’s stuff to actually track. He’ll no doubt blog about how he’s done the console screens once he’s written up all the fun he had doing the lifts.

Aaron and I had a very important business meeting this weekend at our head office (cough) The Coach and Horses. Among the things we discussed were throwing ideas about on a potential next project after Paradroid, and debating wether we need to have gamepad support in Paradroid. As I’ve mostly just used keys/mouse on the games I play on the Mac, and just stick to playing most big games on the PS4, I hadn’t given it much thought until now.

More work on the transfer game this afternoon.

Creating the transfer game was always going to be a major task in Paradroid due to the complexities of having a random element to every game screen generated but having to make every one actually playable.