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.

While Aaron and I were looking into wether we could actually do our own clone of Paradroid, I also went looking for some alternative music as I didn’t fancy the idea of using the droid chatter system of the original game.

Even though the title sequence still needs some work to get it up to standard, we decided that it was something to come back to later as there will soon be enemy droids going into the game. Obviously, without having the transfer game in place, it’s going to be just the shoot-em-up aspect of Paradroid we’ll be testing and fixing, so it’s time to get that done now so all aspects of enemy droids can be set up in one go.

Started ripping out the temporary text lines I’ve been using for testing the scrolling information. Had all sorts of fun and games creating a routine to load in a text file and then display the text using a DS_list. Because I’d been editing it on the virtual PC  it had inherited all sorts of stupid formatting codes that weren’t visible and caused the formatting to go all over the place. Eventually got that all sorted out and finally had reasonably formatted instructions doing what I wanted.

Busy doing other things today so, rather than attempting to write code in a short amount of time, I went through what I actually had to comment it all up so it’s readable by Aaron as well as myself. I have to remember sometimes that I’m working collaboratively now and this stuff has to be done for both our convenience.

Today was a day of pretty heavy research looking into the most effective way to do the scrolling system on the title screen. As mentioned previously, I’ve tried a few different ways with varying success but the general rule appears to be to use a surface to get it done properly. This did turn out to be true.