The Malgorian Blog

I've been burnt out on actual coding for a while now - granted all I do is code in 7800Basic for the Atari 7800.

Between 2018 and 2020 I spent a lot of time planning some games, writing things down etc.

Last week I went back to Graze after watching a streamer play it for about 10 minutes. Well, almost 10 minutes I guess. The game is basically in alpha so I can't really say I'm surprised, although it was a bit of a pain to watch it being streamed between games that are in advanced beta and fully finished games. ^_^

For right now I've just been doing some tweaks outside of the game kernel itself, taking the feedback I saw in the comments and the like into consideration. One thing I did do however is write down exactly how the wave mechanic will work. These will basically be the stages. Pretty straightforward - you collect icons to activate special events, including the boss of the level. Once the boss is defeated, the wave is over and bonus points are calculated. Various things get unlocked by beating bosses and special events, including new icons that can be collected to unlock newer events - including the next boss in the list.

The only combination that will be easily available will be the one for the current wave's boss. If there are any other special event combination that's available are 'hidden' in that there's no particular effort to advertise them as is. However I plan to add a random combination during the bonus point awarding between waves. It'll be randomly selected but will be one of the codes that were available on the wave that was just beaten. Perhaps for the final stage, it'll display one after the last boss was completed during the final bonus points calculation.

No game night again this weekend. While the weather has been pleasant for the first time in a month this weekend I just didn't feel like gaming much. I did play a bit more of Hatsune Miku Project Diva Future Tone (PS4) on a few songs. The main goal there was to increase my rank in the leader board for a couple songs. On average, on Hard difficulty, I seem to rank around 2000-3000 in most songs.

For the few songs I tried to actively increase my standing I've landed with spots around 240-300. To get those I had to get a Perfect along with "Cool" ratings on over 90% of the notes. Not easy to do - and there's certainly room for improvement as shown by the people above me in the rank. I did notice today that there was another way to increase the score - if you have two hold buttons one after the other you don't have to stop the first to do the second. In fact if you just press down the extra button it'll combo. This means I've been missing a lot of points in a few songs!

But I'm tired of playing it for now.

I also played a little bit of Scarlet Curiosity to raise up the levels of Remeilia (I'm sure I'm spelling her name wrong :P). I was doing that to try to get one of the last few trophies for the game, where you have to do over 10000 points of damage in a single hit. X_X

Somehow I managed to do that tonight. Must have hit a weak enemy with a max critical.

For the rest of the night I plan on tinkering a bit more on my game project with 7800Basic. I'm restructuring the game mode so that the timer works differently. Right now the timer only counts down to 0 then switches to a new wave - resetting it's timer and continuing. Since this game is all about trying to graze and destroy the enemies on screen I've decided instead to alter how the timer works. Now it will count down to 0 as before but if you graze an enemy time will be restored a bit. Longer grazes will of course increase the timer more. If the timer hits zero, it's game over. There are still extra lives, but the timer going to zero will forfeit them.

I did several parts of the timer alteration already earlier this weekend. Tonight the main task is just to adjust the timer's properties, add in the timer bonus via grazing, and add in the game over check for the timer hitting zero.

For anyone who's interested, you can see the details of the development of my first Atari 7800 game right over here!

I've mentioned it before a few times recently, although it's progressing nicely and currently playable.

You will need either MESS/MAME or Prosystem in order to play it. MESS is included in MAME at this point it seems, and the latest version of Prosystem is linked on the atari age forum.

Prosystem is less accurate (particularly for the colors!) but I find it easier to run. MAME actually crashes/bluescreens my computers.

Anyway, the goal of the game is basically to graze against the enemies that fly on the screen without letting them score a direct hit. Essentially the white dot in the center of the character is what you can't let enemies touch. Your suit charges as you graze, and when it's strong enough it'll let you destroy the next enemy you hit instead of the other way around!

The next thing up will probably be adding powersups. I've got a bunch of ideas for them already, although I've been letting it drag out because I wasn't entirely sure how I wanted the powerups to work (how to obtain them.) Pretty much going to go with the idea that you'll have to destroy the enemy it's attached to at this point, which means you'll need to have some grazing done in advance!

Ok, I've been having this wicked cough and stuffed up nose/runny nose system that's been pissing me off all week long. Today... seems a bit better... at the very least full blown coughing fits aren't common.

Either way I decided to take this week off from work as vacation so I don't need to be making a long walk to work each day which might be part of why it's taking so long to get it under wraps. :/

But anyway, since I'm not feeling like total crap (and never was beyond the above two symptoms) I think I'm going to try to work on the 7800Basic some more. I've been rather lax with it since this started.

I'll just make three main goals to complete for next weekend.

1. Start making some tiles I can use in the final game. (Granted it may change from now to then, but I'll use these as I test) I could either work on overworld tiles, or town/etc type tiles.

2. Since I got my horizontal scrolling to work smoothly I wanted to alter it to make it more usable. Right now the player is locked to the center of the screen. And while I want the system to center the player whenever possible, I want the player to move to the sides of the screen when the edges of the map are reached. This is also needed for allowing fixed-point movement. Where the player can move faster or slower than one pixel per frame. The current setup doesn't allow for it, particularly for going faster than 1 pixel per frame. This is the BIG thing. Conceptually I think I already have it worked out though...

3. Solid tiles. IE: make it so that certain tiles can stop the player from moving on to it. Walls, closed doors, water, etc, are all examples of that for exploration maps. For overworlds, you'd have mountains, ocean/lakes/etc

I still haven't quite decided if I want to attempt 320-resolution modes or not. The color limitations are pretty staggering. Looking at the 7800Basic documentation, it is possible to split the screen so that the top and bottom (programmer determined) are split modes. One is 320, the other 160. I'll DEFINITELY be making use of that for some things, particularly speech balloons. Might see about doing that for a status screen as well, where information is more important than flashy colors...

Well, there's lots of things I plan on doing for the game, and I'm sure I'll write notes down for a lot of it as I go, but this week if I can manage the above three things I'll consider the week a complete success.

As a follow up to the last post, I'm actually working on stuff! :P

Last year I tried to do a screen builder on the 7800 using assembly. I almost got it working. But not quite. I don't know if the issue was with something I did or if it was just the emulator not doing things perfectly. Either way, this time around I'm going to try to use the 7800basic compiler developed by RevEng on Atari Age.

Since the 19th, I've more or less got a good idea of the style the game will take and started a list of the various usable items you can find in the game. So from here, before I got any further I started tinkering with 7800basic itself.

The installer .bat file, which really doesn't do anything beyond set up the path to the program itself, failed to run on my comp. Apparently need Vista or later for some functionality it has. But no problem! The readme file explains how to set them manually for the older folks. Once I got that done, I tested it by trying to compile some of the sample programs. Works!

Also, while it's still a ways off yet before I'll need this, I downloaded and installed the Tiled program, which is used for making 2d tile maps for games. It's not 7800-specific, in fact it's intended more for PC games in general. So long as the maps made keep to the limitations of the 7800, I can make maps with it and import them into the game rom at compile time. It'll open and read the file for me and set stuff up then I can just use it as needed.

Either way, the installation worked. And I can run the program - I had to check that in particular because there are some programs I use to use on older computers that instantly reboot this computer. X_X

Anyway, Tiled works. 7800basic works. Project looks like it's off to a good start, but I still have to learn the syntax of 7800basic - it's similar to regular Basic but it's obviously not the same. It has it's own limitations, special commands for working configuring the game parameters (rom size, pcb configuration/assumptions (does it have onboard ram, etc)).

Some of what I'm reading is very promising and looks like it might be extremely useful. And while I want to avoid it if at all possible, you can add inline assembly code in the games as well. There are routines for handling the pause button, software collision detection, saving/restoring/clearing the screen, and several methods of interacting with the sound. Either using the TIA sounds in the console itself or making use of a pokey chip on the cartridge. I hope this gets expanded support whenever the XM module is released since that will have a pokey plus another chip - a YM2151 or something similar.

I am on the preorder for a XM module. So I have no problems with trying to write this game to work on that. But we'll see.

A couple of things I need to get my hands on however will include a ram cartridge so I can test roms on real hardware instead of relying on emulators, and perhaps a new 7800. My 7800 is a bit beat up, but I'd like to get a later model - one of those without the expansion port.

Trying to save up cash either way, so I'll see about getting at least a ram cart by the summer. The second 7800 is more optional.

I also have an AtariVox unit that can be used for this. It's basically a game save module for the Atari 2600, but it works just fine in the 7800. Could use that for save games, as I think 7800basic supports it.

Either way, I'm already working past my Feb 1st deadline. Moving on to getting comfy using 7800basic, and attempting to modify the sample programs to see how things change, I'll probably try to make my own graphics file and get that to compile with one of the samples.