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24
March 2007
Side project time
I've been planning this one for a little while, and have decided to
take a break from Chaos Caverns and do something a little
different. Strictly speaking it isn't going to be a remake - but
is going to be in a fairly retro style.
I'm experimenting with a more object-oriented style of programming,
which is taking a bit of getting used to. A quick demo has been
put together which will probably form the basis of the first
level. I'm expecting the final game to have maybe a dozen levels
before looping, this depends on how much graphics get done.
03
February 2007
Chuntey and cheese
While I'm waiting for the decorators to take over the house
decorate the back room I'm trying to get in a bit of coding.
Hopefully I may get another couple of levels created this week (if all
goes according to plan).
New baddie:
New
Level:
20
January
2007
Chaos Caverns 1.200 released
It has been just over a month since the last release, and what a month
it has been! The combined total of downloads for the Linux and
Windows versions has been over 500!
So what's in store for the next release?
I've been putting some ideas together for that. Lifts will
probably be in, as will extra levels. I'm aiming for a good few
more levels before version 1.300. As luck would have it, whilst
reading through Retro Remakes rundown
of the Miner Willy games it mentioned a semi-follow up to Manic Miner
which only appeared on the Vic 20 called "The Perils of Willy."
This looks like it could be a good source of some extra levels to
add in to this game. I'm going to download it later on and see
how well its level designs will fit. From what I've seen it
should be pretty straight forward to port some of it over. And
the good news is that there are 30 levels to the game - which should
pad things out quite a bit!
Arcadia has also seen some love and has been released too with a couple
of bug fixes and full joypad support.
I've contacted Retro Remakes and The Linux Games Tome with news of the
new release - so it will be interesting to see how many hits on the
site there will be.
More later.
17
January
2007
Finishing touches
A long-standing annoyance has been the mouse pointer showing up in
Chaos Caverns when running full-screen. That is now fixed - and
the damn thing doesn't come back when changing resolutions either.
I've been tweaking the UI a bit to make things nicer when using a
joypad. Button 1 jumps, Button 2 is used to start the game.
This seems to be the best configuration at the moment. Of
course - you could just use the keyboard. . . . .
16
January
2007
The
Joy(stick) of it all
This is a turn-up for the books - I've done something with Arcadia!
Well, it looks like a (tiny) bug crept into the last test release
of Arcadia - which prevented the score from being increased when you
shot the enemies. I've fixed that, and also got joypad support in
and working on Linux too! It turns out that there was a little problem
in the joystick handling module in BlitzMax, but there was a fix
for it. So I'll probably make another quick release of that
tomorrow.
Because the joypad support now works, I've added that to Chaos Caverns
- so you can control your Willy using a joypad (ooh-er!).
14 January 2007
Changing, re-arranging
I've been
re-ordering the levels a bit to try and even things out a bit (so
similar levels aren't grouped together). I'm going to have to add
some new levels in the middle I think.
The new order is as follows:
01 The Mine Entrance #1
02 The Mine Entrance #2
03 This Looks Familiar
04 The Managers Office
05 Back in Cold Storage
06 Monty's Store Room #1
07 Technician Willy?
08 Phone Home
09 The Mad Hatters Den
10 Monky Business
11 The Vat
12 The Money Pit
13 The "Hot Tea" mod
14 Flippin' Eck, It's Fred Harris!
15 The Eugene Twins
This moves some of the easier levels closer to the start, although I'm
going to have to play through this again and possibly re-order some
more.
New baddie:
This is
another baddie from the Monty Mole games. I've also updated the
crusher to look a bit more modern. The sneak preview shot has
been updated to show the updated graphics.
13
January
2007
Level 11
Today's new
addition is the crusher (as seen on the Monty Mole games). I've
pretty much finished editing Level 11 (Monty's Store Room #2) and have
added a sneak preview screenshot as the "Featured Screenshot" on the
main page.
I think I might look at re-arranging the order of the levels so some of
the more "fun" levels appear earlier on.
12
January
2007
Today's new feature is. . . . .
So far I've
added something new each day this week (OK, so the stairs took two
days) and today's addition is Monty Mole. That famous 80s
platform star returns to guard his hoard of coal - and actually fits in
to the game really well.
New Baddies:
- Monty
Mole
- Blue
Blob
- Green
Blob
New Item:
I'm tempted
to release an updated version of the game, but on the other hand I
think it would be better to wait till there is even more new stuff to
make the update worthwhile.
To make things a bit easier (again) I've increased the starting number
of lives from three to five.
11
January
2007
Bug fixing
Sometimes a
small bug can take a long time to fix, such as the staircase bug that
crept in with the new code. Basically you could jump into a
staircase from below at which point you would be "sucked" up till you
were standing above the staircase. There was a two part fix to
this (the main part being an extra check to ensure that the staircase
was below the height of the player) - the upshot is that I can now deal
with solid and semi-solid types of staircase. Result!
The Oxygen meter has been changed to be more like the one in Manic
Miner (have a look at the latest screenshots to see what I mean).
I've also increased the time limit for the rooms to something a
little less challenging.
Once I've got the remainder of the graphics done I can start to think
about maybe doing a level editor for the game (no promises).
10
January
2007
Micro Live!
I've
started
updating the existing levels to take advantage of the new slopes.
Level two has been heavily re-written as I wasn't really
happy with it at all. Other levels are in the process of
being tweaked (and in some cases replaced).
New baddie:
New level:
- Flippin' Eck
-
It's Fred Harris!
Let's face
it
folks
- how could we not include the man of legend himself - the face
of 80's home computing Fred
Harris?
More later.
09
January
2007
The ups and downs of programming
The code
for stairs (or rather sloped surfaces) is now in place and working
well. I may expand the code for moving staircases later on.
Some random ideas that may be added in before the next release:
- Crushers
(like in the Monty Mole games)
- Lifts
(like in Chuckie Egg)
- More
baddies
This should
give me something to work towards ready for the next release.
I'll also be looking at tuning the difficulty level a bit
more as
it has been claimed that the game may be just a touch on the difficult
side (or sadistic as they put it).
I'll also be tweaking the existing levels to take advantage of the new
features (as I write them).
08
January
2007
Back to work
After the
fun of the festive season I've started having another look at Chaos
Caverns. There are a couple of features that I want to add
(such
as stairs and maybe lifts?) which will add a bit more variety to the
levels.
I've got the basic code already in place for the stairs - it's more a
case of getting the sodding thing working the way I want. I
did
have them as part of it before but wasn't entirely happy with how they
worked out. I think I know where I went wrong last time
(famous
last words) so I'll see how things go.
I'm also going to take a bit of a look at adding in support for
multiple languages. This is in part due to the
number of
non-English speakers that have been downloading the game over the past
week (over 250 downloads - most from the Czech Republic) - so it would
be nice I suppose if they could play it in their native language.
Adding language support to the level templates will be quite easy, and
I don't think it will be too hard adding it to the rest of the game.
One thing I will need is volunteers to translate this into
their
language. As I said on the home page, if I do get people
volunteering to help then I'll release the code as GPL at the same time.
If you do think you can help with translating this into your language
(Czech, Spanish, Welsh or whatever) then get in touch. There
isn't much text to translate so it won't be a big job to do - I just
don't want to restort to using Babelfish unless I really have to.
11
December
2006
Finishing Touches part 2
Updated
more of the graphics. To add some variety to the levels I've
started creating some multi-coloured versions of the baddies (so for
example, the phone now comes in yellow, green and red varieties).
The levels have been changed to include the new baddies.
I've also fixed a crash bug which has been lurking in the code since I
started embedding the graphics (aaargh!).
10
December
2006
Finishing Touches
Wow!
It's been a bit longer than anticipated posting anything
here.
Does that mean that I've been sitting in the lap of luxury
doing
nothing?
Well no, of course not. In my (very few) spare moments I've
been
refining the pixel code, re-arranging the levels to prevent a couple of
similar levels from being played one after the other, tweaking the
graphics, and generally arseing around with the code.
The GFX and SFX are now embedded in the game binary, which means that
from here on in the Linux and Windows versions will be packages
separately.
All being even I'm expecting to release something before the end of
this week, so stay tuned!
07
November
2006
Coming soon: Chaos Caverns v2
I've got
into a bit of a roll on Chaos Caverns, so much so that a v2 release of
the game will probably come sooner rather than later.
The exploding pixel effects are in and working well. The code
is
in place to allow multiple level backdrops.
To make things a little easier, bonus lives are now awarded every 500
points.
New enemies:
New levels:
- Monky
business
- The
Mad Hatters Den
This takes
us up to 14 levels. I'm going to change the order of the
levels
to move the easier ones closer to the start. I've uploaded a
couple of screenshots from this version..
06
November
2006
Chaos Caverns released (or is it escaped?)
As you'll
have no doubt seen from the front page, Chaos Caverns is going to be
released some time today.
This does not mean that I have finished with the game (oh no, not by a
long stretch) but that there is enough there for it to be a complete
game (albeit a slightly short one).
New features will be added for the next version (along with some
updated graphics and more levels).
If anyone wants to have a go at designing their own levels, then the
instructions are in the levels directory. Who knows - your
own
level could be part of the next release (fully credited).
TTFN
Update:
A few more tweaks have been made
today. Some of the graphics have been re-touched, some (such
as
the exit) replaced. Level 1 has been re--written to make it
more
challenging. Levels 2 and 3 have all been amended.
These
changes have all been added into the v1 download.
New level:
The new
levels will be included in the v2 release.
I'm also adding some pixel effects when items are collected (Tempest
2000 style). These may or may not stay in for the next
release.
03
November
2006
Phun with GFX
I'm adding
some more graphics to the game to add some much needed variety to the
levels. This also gives me a good reason to get back into the
code ready to start adding in some more features.
I've got some ideas for new features I want to add in, so they'll be
coming for the next version.
TTFN
14
October
2006
Back
to work(?)
New levels:
- Monty's
Store Room #1
- The
Money Pit
More to
follow. . . . . .
15
May
2006
Witty
title to follow ;-)
Working
towards the next release I've been busy updating / adding new sprites,
tweaking some of the levels, adding extra features to the game engine
and generally sprucing things up.
New features:
- Oxygen
level for each room (displayed along the bottom of the screen.
- End
screen (after all lives gone).
- Enhanced
pause screen.
- Documented
the level structure (levels\levels_template.txt).
- New
enhanced/enemies
All this
will appear in the next update which will probably be sometime
this week - real life permitting.
Update
New version ready for download
11
May
2006
New
stuff
There's
still plenty to do on Chaos Caverns. The current hit list is
as
follows:
- Extra
levels - At least 20 before the full release.
- Extra
graphics - More variety of baddies to be added (and impovements to the
existing ones).
- Extra
features - Some have already been added (such as saving the last
screen-mode to a configuration file, adding a "Pause" function to the
game), some are still to add.
- End
screen?
As you can
see - there is plenty left to do - but the game is improving daily and
may be worth another demo update in a couple of days, providing I get
some more levels added.
I've fixed some bugs in the game (although nothing major) and have
changed the way the game is compiled. This has resulted in
the
new builds being less than half the size of the old ones - even with
the new features added. I've also packed the Windows version
-
which is now around 194K in size (down from over 800K). The
Linux
version is around 370K. I was going to use UPX to pack the
Linux
binary too - but found that the game crashes if it is packed - so for
the moment it will remain at it's full size.
I've added animation to the collectable items and added some new ones
too. This just adds a bit of variety to the game.
9 May
2006
Feature
creep
I've added
some more features to the game since the demo version and tweaked the
game a bit to make it a bit more challenging.
Level transitions have been added (you'll see what I mean when you
play), improved graphics, level backdrops, extra baddies, a couple of
extra levels and enough changes to make it worthwhile updating the demo
version and the screenshots.
I'll probably make another release sometime this week so stay tuned.
I've finished adding the vicinity based collision detection to the
enemies, traps and items.
Some of the features in Chaos Caverns are going to make their way back
into Arcadia (screen scaling, windowed / full screen modes, screenshots
and so forth).
Update:
The updated demo is online, as are the
updated screen shots.
4 May
2006
Still
optimising
the code
Screen
scaling is now much improved. Instead of copying the screen
to an
image then re-displaying a stretched version of the image (slow) I'm
now using OpenGL to do the work for me. On most modern
displays
this means that the screen can be scaled to any resolution with nearly
zero overhead for the CPU. So providing you have a fairly
modern
graphics card then things should be cool.
I've also changed the screen handling code to an object oriented style.
This just makes coding the damn thing much easier.
Thinking about yesterdays improvements to the block handling code - the
reason why you gain so much speed is as follows:
Original code:
32x19 blocks with five checks per block (ie. is block above, below,
left, right or an exit) = 3,040
checks per frame.
New code:
3x4 blocks(surrounding the player) with five checks per block = 60
checks per frame.
Now you can see how much less work needs to be done (and remember there
are 60 frames per second, so that is a massive difference: 182,400
checks vs 3,600).
So at the moment, providing you have a half-decent graphics card then
the minimum spec should be around a Pentium II 350 (or possibly lower).
Update:
I've bitten the bullet and placed a
version of Chaos Caverns for download. There are still some
things in the code left that I want to do - such as moving more of the
game logic into the objects - but nothing that is worth holding back
the first release for.
3 May
2006
Optimising
the code
Benchmarking
the
code whilst playing is always worth while - especially as it can show
up some strange things. For example: On level 1 and 2 the CPU
usage was around 25%, but on level 3 the usage was down to around 12%.
The reason for this is simple. On the first two levels there
were a lot of blocks used to fill in blank areas of the screen (example).
Each one of these blocks was being checked for collisions
with the player.
To cut down the amount of checking that is being done I've change the
code so it only runs collision detection against blocks that are within
one blocks width of the player. I'm also able to do more
checks
per block within range at a lower overall cost to the program.
This also
fixes all of yesterdays new bugs.
How much difference in performance does this make?
Well, on all levels the CPU usage is down to between 0 and 0.5%.
There is still some optimisation left to do but there shouldn't be too
many major gains left as far as the standard game goes. Let's
face it - at 0.5% CPU usage there isn't much left to reduce!
Running screen scaling still stinks though as it knocks the CPU usage
up to 75% or higher. I'll have to see what I can do to
improve
that.
2 May
2006
Final
Touches
It looks
like most of the work on this game is now done. I've been
updating the menu screen to make it a bit nicer. I've also
added
some extra features to the game - such as running in a window, scaling
the screen size up when running in a window (1x, 2x, 2.5x), taking
screenshots, toggling the music on/off and generally getting everything
neatened up ready for release.
All the features that I wanted before the test release are done and
dusted, so it's hopefully down to me sorting out some more graphics,
add another couple of levels (I'm hoping for 10 before a release) and
we'll be there.
In the mean time I'll add some more screenshots of the newer levels.
Update:
The screenshots have been updated.
Update 2:
After trying the site in Internet Explorer and finding that it
didn't display as expected I've re-coded the site in a slightly
different way and tested it with Firefox, Internet Explorer and
Konqueror to ensure that it displays the same on the three of them.
Update 3:
I'm probably going to have to put the release date of Chaos Caverns
back a couple of days to finish bug hunting and optimising the code.
To give some idea of how much difference this can make I'll
give
an example of todays improvements (statistics based on an Athlon XP
2200).
Before optimisation: 77% in menu, 29% CPU usage whilst
playing
the game.
After optimisation: 0.5% in menu, 25% CPU usage whilst playing the game.
Quite a big difference isn't it? The only problem is that an
extra couple of bugs have crept in, so I'll need to pick my way back
through the code to make sure everything is working as it should be
before making the first release.
1
May
2006
Animated
Antics
Well, I've
re-designed the main sprite (eight frames of animation to get him to
walk correctly) and re-coded the player animation from "bounce"
animation like the baddies to "looping" animation to get the
swinging of his arms correct.
I've also tweaked some of the other graphics a bit, changed
the
layout of the level files to allow for different collectable items on
different screens. The game layout goes like this (at the
moment):
This
Looks Familiar
Key
11111111111111111111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111
1 2
4
4
2 1
1
2
1
1
1
1
23 2 1
1 ===========DDDD=DDDD========1
1
21
1
1
1===
1
1
###
3
1
1====
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
1
1
==1
1
1
1
3 ###DDDDD===1
1 S
===============
E 1
1
1
11111111111111111111111111111111
Guard2
9
14
1
0
8
17
0
0
1
0
7
#end#
The first line is the title of the level, the second is the type of
collectible that will be displayed. The next 19 lines are the
level layout. After this is the enemy movement patterns.
This is repeated till the "'#end#" marker for as many enemies
as
you want.
I'll put a full description of how the enemy patterns work in the level
design readme.
30
April 2006
Progress
Update
It's been a
busy couple of days - with real life taking priority, such as
flooding the kitchen whilst plumbing in a washing machine (hey - I
never claimed to be a plumber!).
Does that mean that there has been no progress? No it
doesn't!
The features that I wanted before making a release have been
done
- and a couple of nasty bugs have been fixed. The game is up
to
seven levels now and four different baddies. This is where
the
work is at the moment - adding the baddies to the game, tweaking the
level designs and optimising the code.
When should the release come? Well - probably sometime in the
next couple of days for a "preview" release, then a couple of weeks
later for the full one. That should give me enough time to
get
some more levels designed. And if anyone wants to create some
levels themselves for the game - well the instructions will be provided
for doing just that.
I'll also be updating the screenshots and so forth with some more
up-to-date pics of the game.
27
April 2006
Anouncing:
Chaos Caverns
I know,
Arcadia isn't finished (yet). But still, as the downloads
section
was looking a little empty I thought a diversion may be in order.
That and I've been wanting to make a platformer for ages.
Which brings me on to Chaos
Caverns. It's a
single-screen
(but multi level) platformer in a similar style to Manic Miner.
It's not a straight remake of Manic Miner, but there will be
a
mix of the original levels (with some changes) and totally new ones.
Most of the features of the game are already in place such as
soft platforms (which can be jumped through), solid platforms (which
can't), crumbling platforms, collectable items, a working exit, left to
right guardians and some other bits too.
One good thing this has is that the level designs are held in text
files and so can be altered or added to by anyone who wants.
Once
the first release is made then I'll be accepting level designs to
include in the later versions (credit will be given for any that are
used).
There's a couple more features that I want to add before making the
first release (such as conveyor belts and top to bottom guardians) but
hopefully that won't take too long.
I'll add some early screen-shots sometime during the next couple of
days.
Stay tuned for more. . . .
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