I’m on vacation right now so I spent some time on this never ending project. I used the time to build the end-sequence that runs after the credits. In that sequence I show off all of the enemies including their names. Well, here is the great thing: All of the enemies are named after PVB members. I planned this a while ago and requested some of the enemies especially from VirtualBen to fit to certain nicknames. Obviously, I couldn’t put every PVB member into the game. Also, some of guys just don’t sound fishy enough. Here is who made it into the game:
“Bigmak” (Requested Character)
“Minestorm” (Requested Character)
Uncle Tusker as “Vincent the Walrus” (Requested Character)
“Krisse”
“Thundra” (my Wife, not a PVB member but without her there wouldn’t be any games from me)
Ben Stevens as “Ben”
Greg Stevens as “Greg”
8bitmatt as “Matt”
VBMills as “Wesley”
foil_lone_wolf as “Derek”
HorvatM as “Matej”
“Dor-Si”
“dasi”
“Morintari”
RunnerPack as “Amos”
That’s it. No more enemies are left. If I missed someone… well… there will be more games. Want to know which enemy you are? Beat the game! (after it is released)
Protoman85 wrote:
People is just me on this one… And I didn’t even call him greedy, I just said that it felt a little greedy to me. But if he really spent 5 figures on this (which I didn’t know until after) I can’t blame him at all. The one I would call greedy however is the original owner of the ROM/cartridge/code or whatever.
Whenever the rom does get released, I’ll make a review of it.
I would agree that the first person, who owned the ROM, source code or a cart of an unreleased and otherwise unavailable game and who refused to let that game be released from his or her possession unless an extremely large profit could be made from the deal, could rightly be called greedy. It goes without saying, however, that Eric isn’t trying to make any profit off of this and is actually willing to take a loss for the VB community.
The unfortunate thing that the VB community may have to face is that if Dragon Hopper or Zero Racers or some other hitherto unreleased game is out there in private hands, it could very well be in the hands of a greedy person, who won’t give it up unless a ridiculous profit is made in the exchange. So the VB community would have to decide: is it worth it to come together and help pay the very large amount necessary so that the game can be played, enjoyed, and appreciated at all, or is it better to just never be able to play the game?
Those who help pay to get an unreleased Virtual Boy game released – even paying before they know how good the game is from playing it but who want it released anyway because they have an understanding that it is a genuine piece of Virtual Boy history that deserves more than the fate of being lost and unappreciated forever – are awesome in my book.
HorvatM wrote:
I’m not an expert on this, but it looks like you have used up all the WRAM (Work RAM), which is the RAM available for use by the game. It is 64K in size and accessible from 0x05000000 to 0x0500FFFF, then it is mirrored 255 times. Do you have any large static arrays in the code?
I just had a look into the linker script and saw the same thing. I do have some larger array. I guess making them ‘const’ would solve the problem. I had some problems with large const arrays in the past so I tried avoiding them. Just out of curiosity: Why is the wram mirrored 255 times?
After writing some 1000 lines of code I get this linker error:
v810-gcc -Tvb.ld -Wall -nodefaultlibs -mv810 -xc -o fishbone.o fishbone.c
/usr/local/v810/bin/ld: address 0x501022c of fishbone.o section .data is not within region wram
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [fishbone.o] Error 1
When starting to coding the credits menu it ran into a problem. It seems like I produced to much code to fit it into the data section. I get this error from the linker:
v810-gcc -Tvb.ld -Wall -nodefaultlibs -mv810 -xc -o fishbone.o fishbone.c
/usr/local/v810/bin/ld: address 0x501022c of fishbone.o section .data is not within region wram
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [fishbone.o] Error 1
OK, I’m done with all of the polishing. I fixed the issues in the level menu and added music to the engine screen. As the song on the engine screen is rather long I removed the function that automatically closes the screen.
I guess I will continue with the credits-screen next. I’m planning something big for the credits so that there is actually an incentive to play through the game. I bet you guys will love it.
OK… I did all kinds of polishing today. I fixed the speed for the backgrounds, enemies and the player. I also changed an image of the levelmenu as I didn’t liked how it looked. I also switched songs around again. I think they fit very well to the respective levels now. I also changed the demo levels a little bit so that I could try out actual gameplay.
I could release the current version as a new demo. I’m not sure if I should do it though as it shows pretty much every element of the game and I would like to have some things coming as a surprise in the finished game.
There is some stuff left to polish though. There is a minor thing bothering me in the level menu. And I would like to have sound on the Engine screen. I’m not sure what to put there though.
It is known as one of the best VB games and I guess the cards will be sold out soon. It is absolutely worth its money and the seller is a 100% truth-worthy.
It is just great to see that all of these games finally make their way out of private collections to the surface for everyone to play.
I already told Eric that I will buy the complete set, not so much because I want this game so badly, but because I appreciate what he does for the community.
OK, just a quick update. I added all of the enemy types to level 3. Two of them are copies from another level which made this a little bit easier for me. I had to copy one enemy because of space problems (it is the mine so it fits into every level). The second one I had to copy because Ben provided me with to few Sprites. I is just a small enemy and I think it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t change it now even if Ben would draw a new enemy.
However, I just realized I forget to add the end-of-level flag to all of the levels. I will probably change that tomorrow.
I just added the bounding box and all of that stuff for the enemy from yesterday. I like the results. I still need to add some more enemy types to that level but I’m not in the mood for it today.
There was a Christmas Party at work today so I didn’t do allot. I somehow messed up the order of level 3 and 4 in the level menu so I fixed that. I also removed all of the copied enemies from level 3.
I started adding the first enemy type for level 3. It is the biggest enemy in the game. I only made sure the animation looks good so far. Still have to define the bounding box, movement and all of that stuff.
… and I added the last enemy type for level 4. This was an enemy type that reoccurs in all levels, so it wasn’t that hard to add. I will now prepare a short demo level that shows off all enemy types. This is just something I do for testing reasons.
I like how this project developed. Did you ever consider changing sprites and music to make it a even more unique experience? It sounds like Greg has the skills to pull something like that of.
