Let the Invasion Commence [PART 5]

3rd September 2016 - On a terribly rainy day

Yesterday I mainly worked on the title screen, and I got it working (apart from the hi-score table, which has not yet been implemented - that will be last thing). The game has got in game music working, and there are 23 levels. Making more levels will commence perhaps next week.

Today, I worked mainly on the 2x2 void effect inside the game. The feature only scrolled one direction, which was upwards. I decided to add a special feature to the void scrolling, so that it uses a timer which will scroll the void clockwise after a certain amount of time. The next trick I wanted to do was add the in game 'Trance' music's beat to flash the void. In order to do this, I had to hunt for the correct bytes in the Goat Tracker music player, using a native C64 tool. Who, in the demo scene remembers 'Music Wizard' by Faces?. I managed to find the byte that made the drums kick in. Then I implemented a value check equalizer subroutine. It checks for the drum sounds, and then flashes the grid through a timer. I was really pleased with this.

The result was quite pleasing, but there was still more to be done to the void. New colour tables were set for the levels, so that you don't get the same grey flashing scheme on all levels. After each level progresses, a different colour flash was called, and made things more interesting. That still wasn't all for this.

The game was missing a variety of different voids for each level. So I loaded up the charpad V1.8 , and generated some 2x2 void chars. After 10 different voids were done, I exported the chars to binary form, added some more tables and subroutines, then had a good result ... Well, sort of ... The void chars needed quite a bit of altering, to get right. I was happy with the final void chars. Only one problem came by with this. The colour flashing is TOO light, which made it hard for me to see the transparent invaders. So, in order to solve this problem I decided to mix mostly dark colours inside the flash. The result went quite well. I'm very happy with the scrolling void, and also the music kicking in to flash it as well.

Next week, I will be ready to implement some more levels, and maybe add some power up into the game next week as well.