Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 2 We Have A Title Screen

Welcome back, this is the second in a series of videos where I program the commodore 64.  I am currently programming a game.  The game is a text based dungeon diving adventure game.

In this video I went ahead and implemented my rudimentary state machine for the game.  The first state is the title screen.  So I've gone ahead and implemented the title screen.  The game is working pretty well right now.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 1 Initialize the Game

OK so I decided to start programming a Commodore 64 video game. In my last programming video I'd made a Christmas candle it was written in Commodore 64 BASIC.  I enjoyed this process very much and the urge to do another project has started to tempt me.  I had been watching various you two videos of other people's programming projects and several of them had done a simple dungeon crawl.  So I figured that should be my next project.

Bring Back the Arcades of Yore!

Where all the cool kids hung out.

I miss the video game arcades of the early 80s. More importantly I feel sorry for people who were PacMan skillz. Odds are they'd hand your ass to you with their better than uber PacMan skillz.
born too late to experience such places. Arcades were great. They were the social hang outs for us nerds and introverts. Instead of being a jocular football player we could be "cyber" athletes of a sort. Of course there were a handful of nerd girls who'd hang out at the arcades so if you weren't too shy you might be able to woo them with your awesome

Arcades were an awesome experience. They were usually under lit in order to make the games and artwork stand out. The sounds was a cacophony of beeps, bloops and the battling music of attract screens. The only modern equivalent I can give is walking in to a Las Vegas casino and listening to the siren songs of the electronic gambling machines. A lot of times there was the steady flow of Top 40 music coming from speakers embedded in the ceilings of these places. You might just make out the tunes of a favorite song above the din of the machines.

Disney Confirms "Other" Star Wars Films!

A movie I may have.

Okay, if you are a fan of Star Wars (like I am) then you will be interested to know that Disney and Lucasfilms has officially confirmed that there will be stand alone films that are not part of the new Trilogy coming soon.  What does this mean?

Okay, we all know that Episode VII is coming in 2015 with Episodes VIII and IX coming shortly after that. This will, most likely, follow the family Skywalker the same as Episodes I through VI. That much has been (pretty much) established though no real plot details of the new trilogy have been revealed..

I Played Risk And I Lost...But I Loved It!

I didn't win.

Last Sunday I pulled a six hour game of Risk with some friends. Actually it was Lord of the Rings Risk but that's not important. It marked the first time in a very long time that I actually got to sit down and play the game. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it. I'd like to do it more often.

One of the things that I noticed was how frustrating it gets when you are trying to take over a country just to gain a Risk card. On many occasion you'd have a stack of five armies  and were going against a single army. You could roll three sixes but it seemed like the defender was always rolling sixes too. In Risk the tie goes to the defender. It's maddening to have a large stack of armies whittled down to a couple due to (apparently) bad dice rolls. You'd swear those things were rigged.

The game overall was fun and I really enjoyed myself. Next time I intend to win and not come in second place.

I'm Your Zombie Wingman!

Created by Oatmeal

It's good to know that when the zombie apocalypse happens that I'll have some staying power...

Game Update 4: A New Mapping Solution?

Mappy Fail?

I have spent many long hours staring at the code I've written for my Ultima Style cRPG. As I mentioned back in my last up date I'd run into a few snags. One was a crashing problem where I was trying to de-allocate memory for an object I created twice. That fix came pretty quickly once I looked at what I was doing.  The next problem has not been so easy to fix.

The problem I'm having (and I'll see if I can explain it) is I have a tile based map (using Mappy) and I have a little animated guy running around the map. Now, every time the little guy moves he moves an arbitrary amount of pixels. This represents his speed and needs to remain constant through out the game. Since the map is bigger than the window that contains it the map needs to scroll. The part of the map that is shown while scrolling is represented by a rectangle and it has a coordinate system that is an offset from the coordinates of the little guy.  The problem is when I'm on the upper and left side of the map the guy moves the correct amount of pixels and the offset moves the correct amount of pixels. But when the little guy hits a certain point going left or going down he begins to double the amount of pixels he moves each time but the offset moves the correct amount of pixels. Eventually the little guy outruns the offset and goes off screen. I have no idea what is going on behind the scenes to make the little guy suddenly double his movement amount but not the offset. Arrgh!

I hope anyone reading understands.