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Omnimaga => News => Topic started by: squidgetx on February 18, 2011, 05:35:39 pm

Title: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: squidgetx on February 18, 2011, 05:35:39 pm
Benumbered 2.0 (an update from the old 1.0 (http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/339/33912.html)), recently released as a beta on Cemetech by cerzus69, is a Bejeweled port written in z80 asm. Instead of using jewels, we get to swap around numbers, from one to seven. The game is very polished already, even in its beta state. Its many features include six gameplay modes, flickerless four level grayscale, cascade animations, 24bit highscores, and even hints. o.O
(http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/benumbered3.gif)
You can download the beta from the Cemetech archives here (http://cemetech.net/programs/index.php?mode=file&path=/83plus/asm/games/Benumbered%20v2.0.zip) and follow its progress in its thread (http://cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5778).
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered beta
Post by: ztrumpet on February 18, 2011, 05:44:25 pm
Wow, this looks wonderful.  He did an awesome job! ;D
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered beta
Post by: Madskillz on February 18, 2011, 05:44:41 pm
Well this isn't the first release of this game, but I'm glad to see he added greyscale.  I don't get the point of 24bit highscores, but to each his own I guess. It looks great.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: thepenguin77 on February 18, 2011, 05:52:21 pm
Looks great. I love to games still being made in asm.

When you're doing your grayscale. How are you drawing it? Across rows or down columns? Because while there is a slight speed cost for drawing across rows, you'll notice an improvement in flicker.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 18, 2011, 06:43:03 pm
Wow that looks great! By the way is that member a part of the forum here? I swear I saw his nickname somewhere. I wonder if he'll eventually work on some new projects and post about them? A lot of people might be interested.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: Deep Toaster on February 20, 2011, 04:51:15 pm
Wow, that game looks really good, especially the graphics! And it looks harder than Bejeweled (slightly).

Glad there are still great ASM games in dev!
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 20, 2011, 08:11:16 pm
Me too. IN 2009 I really thought ASM game dev was pretty much dead and everyone moved to BASIC. Not that the latter is that bad but I mean it's incredible what ASM could do, so it's nice to see more ASM dev again now.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: cerzus69 on February 23, 2011, 07:07:10 pm
By the way is that member a part of the forum here? I swear I saw his nickname somewhere.

That's right, I asked about 24-bit division, which in the end I didn't need.

Thanks, squidgetX, for starting this topic and putting up the screenshot! I didn't realize it existed before I googled 'Benumbered' to quickly go to its page on ticalc and found a link to this.

Madskillz: It's not like anyone is gonna get a score close to 9,999,999 (or 16,777,215) in this game soon, but I did not feel like capping it at 65,535, so that's why I use 24-bit scores. The highscore lists in the menu are ridiculously high and it is on my to do list to change those to reasonable highscores to beat in the finished version.

thepenguin77: For the grayscale I use a very similar method to the one used in Diederik Pieter Kingma's <a href="http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/295/29520.html">GPP</a>.

Thanks everyone else for the positive comments! I'll have to have another look at it, because it is writing to some bad memory addresses on my TI-83+ sometimes and I did not locate the source of the error yet, but I'll try and do that tomorrow.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: shmibs on February 23, 2011, 08:53:27 pm
as i said on cemetech, fantastic job on this, cerzus!
thanks for putting in the effort required to make a well-polished release!
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: Deep Toaster on February 24, 2011, 12:04:50 am
Yep, well-polished. The graphics are amazing.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 24, 2011, 01:35:31 am
I wonder if this will get a ticalc feature when they sort their news editor issues. One thing is that this is well-polished so far and another thing is that there is only one other graphical bejewelled clone available for the TI-83 Plus series.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: cerzus69 on March 08, 2011, 11:01:58 am
I wonder if this will get a ticalc feature
That would be awesome!
It's nearing completion now. I basically only have to do the high score saving before it can be released as a real game. :D
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on March 08, 2011, 12:43:32 pm
Awesome! Can't wait for the final release. :D
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: cerzus69 on April 19, 2011, 09:07:57 am
The final release has been online for over half a month now, but seeing as this has been read more times than I would have expected I'm putting up a link to the file at ticalc.org.

http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/436/43675.html

Here are some up-to-date screencaps:
(http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/0-Action.gif) (http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/0-Classic.gif)

(http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/Endless.gif) (http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/0-Shift.gif)
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: Munchor on April 19, 2011, 09:09:25 am
A version 2! Nice job =D
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 19, 2011, 01:27:11 pm
Nice. I saw it on ticalc for a while but was not sure if it was the final version. You should really e-mail them because this deserves a front page mention there.

Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: Munchor on April 19, 2011, 01:33:28 pm
Nice. I saw it on ticalc for a while but was not sure if it was the final version. You should really e-mail them because this deserves a front page mention there.

Just like it had here, I totally agree. However, ticalc doesn't really feature as much as they should.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: Deep Toaster on April 19, 2011, 10:09:23 pm
Special effects and graphics are incredible, as always. Great job!
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: cerzus69 on April 27, 2011, 06:40:12 am
Nice. I saw it on ticalc for a while but was not sure if it was the final version. You should really e-mail them because this deserves a front page mention there.
And how would I go about that? I mean I can't just tell them that they should can I?

Sorry for the belated reply by the way. I turned the notify on but apparently they ended up in the junk part of my inbox...
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: Stefan Bauwens on April 27, 2011, 06:44:10 am
Nice. I saw it on ticalc for a while but was not sure if it was the final version. You should really e-mail them because this deserves a front page mention there.
And how would I go about that? I mean I can't just tell them that they should can I?

Sorry for the belated reply by the way. I turned the notify on but apparently they ended up in the junk part of my inbox...
I could email them for you.

EDIT: Unless you don't want it of course.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: cerzus69 on April 27, 2011, 07:56:39 am
It would be an honor if you did that for me!
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: TIfanx1999 on April 27, 2011, 08:29:32 am
Wow, this looks really excellent. The graphics and effect really make this game stand out. Fantistic work! =)
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: cerzus69 on April 27, 2011, 09:44:10 am
Wow, this looks really excellent. The graphics and effect really make this game stand out. Fantistic work! =)
Thanks! I think most game programmers out there don't put enough attention to the graphics. For me, those are always pretty important. They add so much to the feel of a game IMO.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: Stefan Bauwens on April 27, 2011, 11:57:03 am
It would be an honor if you did that for me!
Did it. :)
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: cerzus69 on April 27, 2011, 02:28:14 pm
It would be an honor if you did that for me!
Did it. :)
Thanks a lot, man! I'd vote you up, but I either don't know how to or I can't yet because of my low post count...
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: Stefan Bauwens on April 27, 2011, 02:49:27 pm
I guess you have still 3 posts to go, but you don't really have to do that. It was my pleasure.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 27, 2011, 03:05:44 pm
You cannot vote posts up until 20 posts (or maybe it was 40, I forgot). It used to be 5, but then it was changed to 20 after two people signed up duplicate accounts to mass-down/uprate posts.

That said personally I tend to not like when people judge a calculator game solely based on its graphics. I saw many people say that Final Fantasy IV for the SNES sucked because it had lower quality graphics than FFVI and higher and I personally was judged often for my own games in the past. In my case, when I made Illusiat 6 through 12, I was extremly limited in RAM because I could only use pure-BASIC back in 2002, then with the Reign of Legends 1 and 2 I wanted to make sure it fits on a regular 83+. As a result, I was forced to use ASCII art maps and animations to keep a decent amount of features and hours of gameplay in. Illusiat 13 was also ASCII despite having been worked on 7 years later, but that one was meant to remain true to the previous games, so it wouldn't have made much sense to suddently go with hardcore graphics after the 7 previous games were ASCII.

Actually, I think the only issue that arises is that with ASCII, you need to showcase extra parts of your game in animated screenshots, such as magic animations and dungeon maps, so people can see that you used those ASCII graphics properly instead of just mashing random characters around. However, I can tell you that today my Illusiat series is more popular than my more recent graphical games like Metroid II, Reuben Quest and xLIB xLIB Revolution. That said it might be due to the nostalgia factor, though (Illusiat 1 through 12 dates back in 2001-2002)

That said, there is a limit to low quality graphics. I think something like ASCII art would be fine for a BASIC game and monochrome for an ASM one, but people still need to do some effort on these graphics to make the game more enjoyable. I mean, on ticalc.org I downloaded many calculator RPGs with graph screen images, but when using attack, magics and items, all that displayed on the screen was "HERO USED FLARE LV8! 9999 DMG! ENEMY DIES!". Absolutely no animation showed up. In some other cases, the exact same animation was used for all 10-40 magic spells: a flashing screen like in Final Fantasy 1 for the Nintendo. I also am not very attracted by text-only (menu-based/MUD-like) games.

IMHO there needs to be a certain minimum of graphics for calculator games, but I don't think someone's work should be dissed completely if it doesn't have hardcore graphics and grayscale animations if the rest of the game is good. Same goes for program sizes. I saw many people bash people hard work only because of file size, amount of files or graphics, or back in the days, language used.

As for ticalc.org e-mailing, we got suggested in the past that if we got something newsworthy or felt that our own program was, we should e-mail them at contact @<insert their site domain name here>. However, they tend to not feature things as easily since the past year, because Axe Parser took several months to get featured despite having topped TI-BASIC in popularity in the community.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: Stefan Bauwens on April 27, 2011, 03:41:13 pm
Oh, because on the homepage of ticalc.org there was a link called 'Got news' or something. It was a mailto to ' news AT ticalc.org '. This is the email I used.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 27, 2011, 05:37:19 pm
Oh, they probably forgot to update it. Now they only use a single address.

http://www.ticalc.org/about/contact.html
http://www.ticalc.org/help/faq/86.html

Note, a good reason for featuring Benumbered is that it's one of very few existing Bejewelled clones for TI calculators and the best looking one. Last year they featured the Omnimaga Bejewelled clone by Jon, as it was the first ever clone ever made for the 83+ series (and calcs I think), but cerzus pushed Bejewelled even further with the graphics in his game and the features.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: Stefan Bauwens on April 28, 2011, 04:12:39 pm
Ok, I'll resend the email to that adress.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: Stefan Bauwens on June 05, 2011, 06:14:54 am
It would be an honor if you did that for me!
Did it. :)
Thanks a lot, man! I'd vote you up, but I either don't know how to or I can't yet because of my low post count...
Yay! They featured it! Congratulations!
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: cerzus69 on June 10, 2011, 12:25:14 pm
Ah, I was right, you are the one! Thanks a lot for sending it to ticalc.org. It was really exciting to see it on top of the front page! :D
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: Stefan Bauwens on June 10, 2011, 03:21:45 pm
Ah, I was right, you are the one! Thanks a lot for sending it to ticalc.org. It was really exciting to see it on top of the front page! :D
Well I don't believe I'm the only who contacted Ticalc.org . I believe Kerm did too.
Title: Re: cerzus69 releases Benumbered 2.0 beta
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 10, 2011, 04:31:09 pm
I believe someone here contacted them before, but Kerm e-mailed them again when they got a news editor. Congrats because it really deserved it :)