|
FEBRUARY 2019
 Chapter 14 - Level 1 Background Graphics
This week's task was to complete the graphics and tile mapping for Level 1. Using my custom Map Editor
I described in Chapter 9, I placed the graphics tiles into place,
gradually building the overhead city landscape that your GunStar craft
will fly over as it prepares to leave Earth on its journey to the Alien
home world.
It was a time consuming task but looks great when seen scrolling in the game.
Originally, I had planned to have 22 screens per level. This worked out
to 8K for each level, but I found I was out of disk space on a standard
35/40 track disk and DSK image.
I was only short by around 2K and I could have adjusted the space taken
up by some of the other files on the disk but I decided to reduce the
level size to half at 11 screens each which saved 16K of disk space.
The level graphics loop over when the end is reached anyway and I
wasn't planning to have too much interaction with the background. The
player wouldn't have time to take in the view anyway with the aliens relentlessly bombarding from the air.
I look at the arcade game Defender which does a similar thing. The
terrain you fly over is finite and simply loops over as you keep
flying. This gives you a chance to repeat your attack until you
complete your goal.
Panoramic View
On the right, you can see the complete Level 1 map. Viewing the map
doesn't give away any secrets of the game, but I won't show the
graphics for the other levels. I'll leave the players with the goal to
discover it for themselves.
Coming up
Progress is going smoothly and with no other outstanding tasks to complete, I can move forward with the Aliens themselves.
What they do will depend on how much CPU time I have available but so
far I'm tracking well and don't foresee any issues.... famous last
word! :)
Click on the image below to see a YouTube video of my progress so far.
Video Blog #4
|
