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[Moon Goon]

Gnuberubs Sojourn

by TheLoon

for the Sega Genesis

Description:
Gnuberub must find the five artifacts scattered across the land! Each artifact has a unique bond with a particular location. The evil Squarox has already stolen and hidden several items. To correct the lands Feng Shui Gnuberub must find each artifact and place it back in its correct location. Only one artifact can be carried at a time but two power-ups salvaged from enemies can be used.  In addition, the sonar ability can locate artifacts and their coinciding drop-off points (at a substantial energy cost). Flying across the land also requires energy. If reserves get too low Gruberub must forage the current area for energy sources. Returning to the bat cave will also replenish energy reserves and allow you to store artifacts until needed.

The game can be divided between these level/screen types:

Land Map
Bat travel view. Can see whole sections of land. Player can opt to move (takes energy) scan (takes energy) or dive into the current area.

Area View
Top down scrolling shooter view. The player must traverse a section of land. The environment and enemies will be determined by the type of land section. There will always be chances to pick up energy and weapon parts. At the limit of the section the player will either enter the inner sanctum of that section or escape to the Land Map.

Boss View
Here the screen stops and the player is confronted with a boss. When the boss is defeated it may drop an item including keys to inner sanctums or allowing entrance to the current inner sanctum.

Bat Cave
This is an an enclosed section that scrolls a bit. Artifacts may be removed from inventory and safely stashed. Inner sanctums of Area views contain artifacts or artifact drop-off points or other prizes.

Game Completion
The game is won when all 5 artifacts have been found and paired with the 5 coinciding drop-off points. The game is lost if all bats are destroyed.

Further notes:
Per Yurkies request I decided to start an Arcade type homebrew.  As there is no Genesis programming section I've posted it here.  This was going to be a semi-port of ZBlast of Linux and Sinclair fame.  Since then I've been mulling what I can do with my current skills and decided a port may not be the answer.  As well, I wanted something original yet paying homage to games I admire.  Thus, Gnuberub's Sojourn was born!

What if you played a game from the perspective of a certain item stealing bat?  What if walls weren't an obstacle?  Could one make an exciting shooter based off of a premise like item swapping?  I plan to find out!  Since the premise change no current work will be thrown out.  The work setting up the tools and creating the font will be retained.

Tools:
Game Maker 5 (Font and tile utility)
TFM Music Maker (Music import)
GraphicsGale FreeEdition (Tile design)
BasiEgaXorz (Genesis Compiler and IDE)
Mappy (Tile/Graphics) Editor

[Hypnohustla]

I like the nudie part.

[Udderdude]

Divine Sealing is one of the worst shmups ever made, and definitely the worst on the Genesis.  Why would you want anything to do with it?

[Moon Goon]

Divine Sealing is one of the worst shmups ever made, and definitely the worst on the Genesis.  Why would you want anything to do with it?

Tyler Durden wanted to destroy something beautiful.  I'll do the same for something butt ugly.  Wrong + Wrong = Right?  Also, I'm fascinated with text mode graphics.  Also, I'm starting to loathe the compiler I'm using.  It needs proof that it sucks, hard.

It all boils down to a very sick sense of humor on my part :p

[Moon Goon]

Burned through my weekend pretty hard.  It's a habit.  When my body says eat, I eat.  When it says sleep, I sleep.  It didn't leave much room for coding though.

Installed Bleeper Music Maker and got about a dozen notes into a song.  Saved the track and popped the output file into a text editor.  Looks like the actual notes are stored a line after the keyword “MUSICLISTSTART”. An example line of music looks like this:

1/8 A3 - -

All I want is the note and octave in the middle.  My sound engine will take care of duration just fine thank you.  I'll have to make a parser that converts notes into PSG frequencies for the Genesis.

My IDE likes to crash AND NOT SAVE if it doesn't like your HTML support.  The help tries to open a web browser to display a HTML help files and displays a nice error message.  Then it kills hours of work.  Installing the latest IE and Firefox doesn't make a bit of difference.  Some systems it just doesn't like to play nice with.

My text mode won't be IBM CGA mode perfect.  Seems stuck at 40x28 as the closest approximation.

Trying to put down the basic format and functions from my previous game attempts.  Had an idea on how to better deal with tiles and sprites.  Time for some rest.  Maybe meditate on the further things that need to be done.

Later!

Oh, yeah!  One more pro-tip is to store your project somewhere in the Internets - be it an email attachment to yourself or some other file storage service.  You never know when you'll have an opportunity to code and yet left your USB key and laptop somewhere else.
 

[Moon Goon]

Planning a programming blitz this weekend.  Got a working title screen.  Got Mappy all set with the tiles I'll be using.  I can reuse scrolling engine code from a previous Genesis coding attempt.

I'm afraid I'll somehow slack off instead of digging in.  I've got this project and one other going on that need real attention.  Not sure what else I can do to get motivated besides the fear of failing.  Punishments like bitter gourd for dinner if progress isn't made?  Treats if things go well?  Heck, treats while working!  Dunno.

Hopefully the next post will be on Monday with real results.

[Moon Goon]

Screenshots from progress last weekend.  Have to work on cut scenes.  Still not too sure how I'll handle collision.  From my perspective Sega Genesis collision detection sucks.  Pretty sure it has one flag that tells you if any of 80 sprites have collided with eachother.

[Udderdude]

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little a lot.

[Polly]

Still not too sure how I'll handle collision. From my perspective Sega Genesis collision detection sucks.  Pretty sure it has one flag that tells you if any of 80 sprites have collided with eachother.

There is a flag that is set when non-transparent pixels of any two sprites overlap yes. But it is set per scanline, so there's no way of knowing which two sprites caused this. Unless your game only ever uses 2 sprites per scanline of course

[Moon Goon]

This week I've been busy tackling collision.  There are no background objects with collision so a collision map isn't really needed.  I thought I could just check an 8x8 tile position with the player on-the-fly and be done with it.  Something like:

IF player_x>>3 = enemy_x>>3 THEN
    IF player__y>>3 = enemy_y>>3 THEN
        PRINT "BOOM!  HEADSHOT!!"
    ENDIF
ENDIF

Yeah, I've found no reference to the AND keyword working for my compiler.  That's the reason for the nested IF .. THEN statements.

For some reason that code would mess up.  For some reason it would slowly get more offset the farther I got from the middle of the screen.  Instead I went with a soft collision function that takes the four corners of two sprites and determines if they intersect.  As this is not a true bullet hell shmup I figure I can get away with checking for collisions each time an enemy moves.

Not awesomely motivated this weekend but there's no other excuse for not making any progress.  I should at least get the initial intro scenes working.  You know: the cockpit with SORY written on the dashboard :p

[Moon Goon]

Haven't updated in awhile.  Instead of a parody of Divine Sealing I went for an original shooter with overworld called Gnuberubs Sojourn.  Game description is on the first post.

The most recent progress has been integrating the sound effect engine.  While the FM chip is cranking out tunes on 6 channels the z80 is used for a single digital sound effect.  Even though I only get 8 bit mono 16000hz out of it laser blasts and explosions don't sound bad.

Can y'all guess where that disclaimer's from?

[Udderdude]

Action 52 on Genesis?

>_>