I’ve had two days off so I got a lot accomplished. Got some gameplay music added (one song for sneak and one song for peek) and touched up the menus a bit. Also I fixed some of the animation that looked wonky. I’m still not sold on the walking speed, but we’ll see how things turn out.

Single player and two player mode are completely finished. I think all that’s left is doing an options screen and adding powerups/powerdowns.

We’re almost there!

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I finally got the graphics to start on this game about two weeks ago and I really buckled down and finished the two player mode completely a couple days ago, in time for the campout. They’re supposedly going to play it there at some point, but every time I talk to someone at the campout, it seems like they’re too busy. Who knows if it will even get put on a Powerpak there.

Anyway, for the rest of yous, I am try to get some gameplay music together for the game. I ripped an old song I did for the Hellraiser project that went into obscurity and used it as title screen music for this game. I think it fits.

I’m going to add a single player mode to the game (which will be super easy) and then I plan to somehow incorporate zombies into the game, to make it a little more fun. We’ll see what happens.

Thanks for checking back here.

I’ll have some pictures up soon. And you should be able to purchase this game (cart only) before the month is out.

My goal is to have this game done by the campout in mid-August so that I can present the game to all of my drunken friends and we can all suffer in the game’s badness.

It’s going to be a port of the Atari 2600 game, Sneak ‘n Peek. It’s a basic game of hide and seek, with the added benefit of forcing the second player to ACTUALLY close their eyes while you go and hide your character in one of ~20 available hiding locations around a house.

I’m going to probably change the setting of the game from the boring house used in the 2600 version. Hiding in the floor? Give me a break. I’m going to try to at LEAST make it a little more realistic, with actual items to hide behind, all while updating the graphics to NES standards, so it doesn’t look like the sprites are walking around with huge erections the entire time.

Some things I have in mind to spruce things up a little are:

Character select screen
Possible 4-player action
Music that doesn’t sound like ass
Graphics that don’t look like ass

Anyway. If you have any ideas, post them this way. And if you’re reading this, thanks for stopping by. I apologize that there hasn’t been much going on here. I couldn’t tackle the room compression for Leisure Suit, so it’s now officially on the back burner.

This is the era of SNEAK N PEEK!

All of you that own it, give it a whirl.

As for leisure suit, the project is probably on hiatus until I code some other things and develop my skills a little more. Room compression is a little too complex for my little brain. I have a couple other smaller projects lined up to get my feet wet a little more and then I’ll come back to LSL.

Try not to be too mad at me.

Hockey playoffs are sort of interfering with my focus though.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get back on track soon!

Love, Kevin.

Until I get this figured out, Larry is at a standstill. Doh!

First of all, I added a global little text field that shows you on every screen and all the time what item you have selected in your inventory at any moment.  The modified play screen looks a little like this:

As you can see, you’re currently holding the wrist watch, which does nothing except tell you that you need to get laid by midnight. Hopefully users won’t get too confused as to which button does what. A tries to perform an action with whatever is in front of you at any given moment and B tries to use whatever item you’re currently holding. Not too confusing with a controller, but just using the keyboard in an emulator is kind of tripping me up.

I got a lot more work done in the bathroom. I got it so you can get the password and retrieve the ring from the sink. Here’s a little sneak peak:

Nothing special, but I think it looks okay. I don’t have him taking a poop just yet, but I have the important items functioning, so that was enough to motivate me to move on to the next room. I’ll have to go back and tweak things. One thing I’ll definitely need to tweak is the fact that Larry is standing in front of the text box in tight spaces like the bathroom when the text box is triggered. That makes me sad because I REALLY like having him stay on the screen. I don’t really see any other way around it though, besides moving the placement of the text box, and at this point I don’t think that’s something I’d even consider. I like the way it looks in the center.

So the room I got to work on after the bathroom was the bouncer room, that you can only enter after you’ve learned the password.  I drew the bouncer and got him into his position and got his text working if you get close enough to him and try going up the stairs.

I also got the TV text in there for when you try to turn it on.  Uh oh, the knob is broken!  How will you turn it on without the knob??

Other than that I got some basic tweaks here and there that I don’t even remember, but I also got the generic text box working in every room that I have coded into the game so far.  I’m a little pissed because one of my banks that has nothing but 8 nametable data maps is almost full.  I can’t believe 8 maps would take up that much space.  So frustrating.  How am I supposed to fit the other 20 maps in there?

Who knows.  Never a dull moment when programming for the NES.

So, where to begin.  I added an inventory screen.  Let’s skip the nonsense and take a look at it!

Nothing fancy.  Just two rows of 10 slots (that equals 20!) for all the items that are in the game.  I originally had the box taking up the entire screen, but after I figuerd out there were only 20 times, I just fit the box to that size.  This gives me some room to do some potentially fancy stuff (or just leave black.  We’ll see!)

I ran into a couple problems that I didn’t anticipate putting this together.  I think this is mainly because I never think ahead when I want to do something (which probably shows in my end product.  Kind of like the house I live in.  Whoever built that just picked up a hammer one day and started hitting nails).

Problem #1: When you switch from the room you’re in to the inventory screen and back to the room you were in, it moves Larry back to the loading position of that room.  Doh!  Easily fixed.  Just save the X and Y coordinates of Larry’s first sprite ($0360).  From there we can get the coordinates of all 8 of Larry’s Sprite.

Sprite 1, Sprite 2
Sprite 3, Sprite 4
Sprite 5, Sprite 6
Sprite 7, Sprite 8

Sprite 1, 3, 5 and 7 all have the same X coordinate.  Same as Sprite 2, 4, 6, and 8.  And to get the X coordinate for the right column of his body, you just add 8 to the original value (since each sprite is 8 pixels).

To get the Y coordinates, that’s easy too.  Sprites 1 and 2 have the same, 3 and 4 just need to add 8, 5 and 6 need to add 16, and 7 and 8 need to add 32.   Did I get that right?  I’m not double checking here.  I’m in a hurry!

The second problem (actually the first problem, but I didn’t think of this earlier).  When going from the inventory screen back to the previous screen, it isn’t quite as easy as you think.  Each screen that you actually see in the game actually has a loading routine that needs to be run first.  ie:

LoadOutsideBar = $21
Bar = $22
LoadInsideBar = $23
Bar = $24
LoadDrunkRoom = $25
DrunkRoom = $26

As you can see, each variable has an assigned value. I had to create a temporary variable to store which screen I am leaving when traveling to the inventory screen. Then when I go back to the original screen, I pull from that temporary variable and then subtract 1 to get the value for that screen’s respective loading routine. It’s confusing to explain I guess.

LDA gamestate
CMP #STATEINVENTORY
BNE .Cont
LDA statetemp
STA gamestate
RTS
.Cont:
LDA gamestate
CMP #STATETITLE
BEQ ReadStartDone
LDA gamestate
SEC
SBC #$01
STA statetemp
LDA #STATELOADINVENTORY
STA gamestate
RTS

So that’s that.

Another problem to add to the first problem I wrote about is that even after you position the sprites in the correct position after switching back to the first screen, you have to tell Larry which direction he was facing before you looked at the inventory screen. But that just took me storing some more temporary variables. Easy I guess.

One more problem that I had to tackle was when you’re looking at the actual inventory screen, I wanted it to remember which object the cursor was on if you leave the inventory screen and come back. That was an easy fix too, just creating yet another temporary variable.

This blog post was a lot better written and better explained last night. Sorry that you guys are getting a crap post!

Other than getting the inventory screen working, I did a couple more things. I had to move a lot of stuff around from the bank that I alluded to last post. It was getting really full, and eventually caused a bank overflow. It’s a pain in the ass moving stuff around when you, like me, are using an mmc1 mapper. It’s so picky about which PRG it’s supposed to be looking at. Takes 15 minutes just to move one subroutine. But I made a little more space to afford me a couple more days of painless coding.

Also, I did a pretty good job of doing away with a lot of the flickering that occurs between screens. Bunnyboy has always told me that you’re supposed to wait for vblank, then enable the NMI and enable sprite/backgrounds, but that always flickers for me, no matter what I do.

Last night I was experimenting and moved the vblankwait underneath the NMI enable but before the screen turns on. That really helped a lot of the problem (it actually looks perfect in FCEU) but it doesn’t look perfect in Nestopia, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Does anyone have a suggestion?

This is what I have toward the end of every loading state:

;; load all the nametables, sprites, attributes, palettes here and then do this stuff
LDA #STATEBAR ;;change to screen you just loaded stuff for
STA gamestate
LDA #%10001000 ; enable NMI, sprites from Pattern Table 0, background from Pattern Table 1
STA $2000
JSR vblankwait1
LDA #%00011110 ; enable sprites, enable background, no clipping on left side
STA $2001
JMP GameEngineDone

I think that’s everything. I got a lot accomplished and feel pretty good about myself!

I finally took the plunge to do it this morning while Tracy was sleeping, while my brain wasn’t quite awake yet.  I was too tired to realize the monotony and finally got it done.  It actually turned out to be pretty painless.  It took maybe 20 minutes overall, with some minor tweaks I had to make afterwards (updating the tile numbers for the bathroom sprites and also moving some sprites off the screen in both rooms to accommodate for the different CHR information.  But now I have an extra CHR file.  Woohoo!

I will apparently have 6 or so hours to code today, so I am REALLY looking forward to that.  I should be able to make some crazy progress today.  Stay tuned!

So I pretty much finished the inside of the bar yesterday. My girlfriend happened to find a bug in my drunk routine which was kind of funny because she wasn’t even looking for bugs. I was just showing off my progress and then she took the controller for 15 seconds and found a bug. Kind of humbling after thinking I was this badass programmer who made all this progress.

Despite the bug, I moved on into coding the dialogue boxes in the drunkard room. Got the normal “what are you trying to do” routine working, and also got it to where after you pick up the rose it tells you that you picked it up (just in case you didn’t know it was a rose to begin with) and moves it off the screen. I’ve also been creating flags in my code this whole time for things like when you get the whiskey, when you learn the password, and when you pick up the rose, as sort of planning ahead to when I implement the inventory screen (which isn’t far off at this point.)

I still need to code in the conversation with the drunk dude and then program in the flag for when you receive the item from him, but at this point I have the whole thing down pat. It’s a walk in the park!

I did notice a couple days ago that my bank 1 is almost full so I’m going to have to move some subroutines to another bank. Annoying.

After the drunk room it’s on to the bathroom! Woohoo for taking a crap!