Alien Breed 5

[JamesV]

Quick update, nothing too fancy, but just shows a minor improvement in AB5 over previous AB games, where the screen scrolling now pans further up the map during boss fights to give the player a better view of the fight, and then after the boss is killed, returns to centre on the player again.



Normal enemies are now coded as well, atm functioning fairly similarly to how they did in ABIV, although the triggering has been updated to closer match the original games, in theory providing a never ending supply of enemies

[blue_bear_94]

Just curious, will you have the option to skip the intro at the beginning of the game?

[JamesV]

Just curious, will you have the option to skip the intro at the beginning of the game?

Do you mean the 6 pages of text in that teaser program? That won't actually be in the finished product, that was just something extra I did for a bit of fun I'll possibly also do another teaser program before final release, just for laughs

The actual AB5 program itself simply says "JVTI presents" and then goes straight to the main menu screen.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Looks pretty nice. Also I like that boss

Just as an head up since you are new to the era of TI programming where animated screenshots are legion in calculator program showcases (as back when you were very active, no animated screenshot tool actually worked at all): In reference to one of the screenshot of the game you posted (that showed an incredibly long text intro) It's generally a good idea in a screenshot to skip directly (or within the first 5 seconds) to the actual gameplay or graphical intro stuff (if any), so that we do not have to wait half an hour for the text portion of the intro to finish. Otherwise, some people will not bother waiting and they will think that all there will be in your game is text. Since it's gonna be updated in the future, it might be a good idea when you upload your updated file in ticalc.org archives to tell the staff to remove that screenshot from the archive page, to prevent people from fearing they have to go through a very long intro before starting the game.

It's ok though. At least you didn't wait 10 minutes into the screenshot before actually starting the game.

[JamesV]

Looks pretty nice. Also I like that boss

Just as an head up since you are new to the era of TI programming where animated screenshots are legion in calculator program showcases (as back when you were very active, no animated screenshot tool actually worked at all): In reference to one of the screenshot of the game you posted (that showed an incredibly long text intro) It's generally a good idea in a screenshot to skip directly (or within the first 5 seconds) to the actual gameplay or graphical intro stuff (if any), so that we do not have to wait half an hour for the text portion of the intro to finish. Otherwise, some people will not bother waiting and they will think that all there will be in your game is text. Since it's gonna be updated in the future, it might be a good idea when you upload your updated file in ticalc.org archives to tell the staff to remove that screenshot from the archive page, to prevent people from fearing they have to go through a very long intro before starting the game.

It's ok though. At least you didn't wait 10 minutes into the screenshot before actually starting the game.

Thanks DJ_O

Yeah I was wrapped to see that we can make really smooth animated .gifs now, so much better than 10-15 years ago lol!

It's all good, that particular screenshot with the 6 pages of text isn't part of the actual game, it was just a separate program that I put together quickly for a bit of a laugh as a "teaser", sort of like when teaser trailers are put out for upcoming movies. So when the actual game is released, it will be a separate file on ticalc.org, and thus, won't have all that text as an animated screenshot

[JamesV]

Here's another clip showing a few more things that have been coded in.



This clip shows:

• Fire doors being closed, which in the case of this test level is a requirement to finish the level (in the released game there will be many levels that have fire doors that aren't required to be closed, they're just there in case you want to block access of some enemies, or in some cases, you might accidentally trap yourself.
• The new pause/stats screen that shows your health, ammo, weapons, etc.
• The ability to shoot doors open. Note that in the released game, it will take more than a few quick shots - the idea is that shooting open a door is a last resort in case you've run out of keys.
• Enemies spawning, and respawning from the same trigger each time it comes on-screen, unlike previous instalments. This is more like the Team 17 originals.
• The health bar temporarily popping up at the left of screen when you get hurt - it will also show up when you pick up first aid kits that replenish your health.
• A new look power dome being shot.
• The new look countdown timer using a custom font.

[JamesV]

Well the majority of coding is now complete - the game engine is now in a very playable form, and with all the new features & improvements over ABIV that I was hoping to make

Here's another quick shot, showing one of the new features, which is that on one particular level, the player is shrouded in darkness, and thus only able to see a limited distance. Out of all the possible ways this could have been represented, I've gone for a fairly simple look, which imo was the closest I could stick to the original whilst dealing with monochrome graphics.



The next task is level layout and building for all 12 levels. As planned, the levels will be 60x48 tiles in size, much larger than the previous 32x32 levels in ABIV. I've sketched out the layout for levels 1 & 2, so I'll keep working away at it and start some actual game testing along the way

[Builderboy]

I'm very impressed with the darkness effect!  I've seen kinds of raycasted shadow based systems before, but imo those systems have always been a bit sluggish.  Yours, while it doesn't cast shadows, is nice and fast and I think is the best overall way ^^

[JamesV]

I'm very impressed with the darkness effect!  I've seen kinds of raycasted shadow based systems before, but imo those systems have always been a bit sluggish.  Yours, while it doesn't cast shadows, is nice and fast and I think is the best overall way ^^

Thanks!

[chickendude]

I'm curious how you did that, is it just a large mask masked over your tilemap? I dunno how your tilemapper works, but i guess you could even update only the center part of the screen. It looks great and in my opinion much more elegant (and probably much less of a headache to code ) than those clunky blocks you often see. It's essentially a little radar

[JamesV]

I'm curious how you did that, is it just a large mask masked over your tilemap? I dunno how your tilemapper works, but i guess you could even update only the center part of the screen. It looks great and in my opinion much more elegant (and probably much less of a headache to code ) than those clunky blocks you often see. It's essentially a little radar

Yeah, essentially it is just a mask overlayed over the contents of gbuf using the "or" instruction.

The tiles are only ever drawn in full to the gbuf once, when the level is fully loaded. On levels without the above "dark" effect, each frame before drawing sprites the tile background is buffered, then sprites are drawn to gbuf and updated to the lcd, and then the buffered tile background is copied back to gbuf. On levels that have above "dark" effect, the same process is followed, but with the mask being applied each frame as the last step before updating gbuf to the lcd.

As for rendering & drawing the mask itself, the circle is 52 pixels in diameter, so as raw data it's stored as a 56x52 image (7 bytes per line x 52 lines = 364 bytes). The current method of processing it from that raw data works roughly as follows:

• Based on the player y position on screen, calculates if any full horizontal lines (12 bytes of $FF on gbuf) are required at the top / bottom of the screen (outside the bounds of the circle).
• For each horizontal line on gbuf that incorporates the actual circle "mask", it generates a 23 byte-long line, which consists of 8 x $FF bytes, followed by the 7 bytes (56 pixels) of correlating data from the circle image data, and followed by a further 8 x $FF bytes. Having this buffer then covers all possibilities of the player x position on screen.
• Based on the player x position on screen, calculates which section of the 23 byte buffer is required, bit shifts that particular portion accordingly, and then applies it to the horizontal line on gbuf by "or"-ing it with each of the 12 bytes.

I haven't really optimised it yet either, so hopefully I can get it slightly faster

[JamesV]

Level design can get a little monotonous.. So I quickly put together a second "teaser" program/clip, just for fun and also to show off the new splash screen that will form part of the main menu

[Stefan Bauwens]

Looks very nice.

[tr1p1ea]

Looking awesome.

[JamesV]

Looking awesome.

Thanks tr1p!

Here are a couple of new clips. Nothing too fancy The first clip just shows level 1 in the basic on-calc tile editor I made, and the second clip shows a bit of basic gameplay from level 1.