Thursday 15 May 2014

Scaffolding

A surprisingly productive day today!

Managed to complete the left and right digging, though holes are yet to be filled-in.

The rest of the progress was scaffolding around the main loop and in-game keys. There's a proper distinction between attract mode and game play mode now, and you can exit from the former. The high score display screen (with dummy data) is also in the outer loop now, and it all transitions properly, and the correct game levels are displayed in both demo and play modes.

There's a bunch of in-game CTRL key functions including killing your player (for when you get stuck in holes that enemies can't get to), adding an extra life, skipping to the next level, freezing the game, terminating the game, and displaying the high scores. Most of these have been implemented now, as they are very handy for testing!

There are now 5 game levels - in addition to the 3 demo levels - and I'll probably leave it at that when I release a playable demo due to space restrictions. In fact, I'm almost at the limit for the Coco3 now (16KB program space from $4000-$7FFF) without having to resort to writing loaders to shift data into high memory.

The two functions I want to complete next are filling in the holes, and running the attract mode logic. (once these are complete, all that remains is the code for rendering and the enemy and the AI). I've identified both but am yet to decide which to implement first. The latter will be easier, but won't work properly until the former is complete. Decisions, decisions...

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