Btw., did anyone experience glitches when it came to persisting the game scores? Like the score being 000 or 999 after switching the VB off and on?

I changed the way how I handle the SRAM slightly.

I often use all of the “levels” at once and it has never been a problem. I will have a deeper look into your code when I have some time. This won’t happen any time soon though.

For now you could just try to reduce the “copymem” statements to a minimum, this should eventually speed up your game.

OK, I assume you convert your sprites using VIDE. Right now you have one image for each sprite and convert each of them to header files using vide. If you want to change a Sprite you copy the respective header file to the memory.

Copying the content of header file to the memory takes allot of time. I guess that’s why your game is slow.

I usually do it this way: I draw one image (512×512 px) that contains as many Sprites as possible. If you have reoccurring 8×8 blocks in your sprites you can actually put allot of sprites into one of these images. I then convert this image (that contains multiple sprites) to one header file. As soon as the game starts I copy the content to the memory. This is only done once! When I want to switch from one Sprite to another I simply change the mx and my values of the respective sprite.

void vbSetWorld (s16 nw, u16 header, u16 gx, s16 gp, u16 gy, u16 mx, s16 mp, u16 my, u16 width, u16 height)

I would provide some code samples but as I said, I really have problems understanding your code.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Oh man… I hope you’re planning to sell copies of carts and boxes of your game. If so, let me be one of the first orders! 🙂

I’m not interested in making money with my games but I guess if the interest is big enough the uncle-mak-storm connection would produce some professional copies.

You can always ask Richard for card though. I published the Label and the Box Layout in the GameHero Thread. Making a box is as easy as ordering a photo and cutting the box out.

Dreammary wrote:
I wasn’t being serious, cant you tell the image I messed with is crappy?

hehe

Yesterday I made a GameHero Box so that the card has a place to life. A made a glossy and a normal version. The glossy one is a prototype and has some scratches.

The red of the Box and the card is actually darker. That’s just my crappy camera.

Attachments:

1. 

   rb1.jpg
   

2. 

   rb2.jpg
   

Hey, I just look through your code as you said you had problems with your game being to slow.

I just had a very brief look into it. Please don’t get this wrong but your code is pretty hard to read as you write everything into the main method and don’t format it correctly. I know it’s no necessary but for a complex project like yours it would make it much easier to keep track of what is going on.

One thing that cached my attention is how you handle your animations. Every time you switch a sprite you copy the new one to memory and thereby replace the old one like this:

switch (animframe2) {

case 1:
copymem((void*)CharSeg2, (void*)GIANTCRAWL1CHAR, 512*16);
copymem((void*)BGMap(2), (void*)GIANTCRAWL1MAP, 512*16);;
break;
}

This actually takes allot of time. I usually copy as many sprites to memory as possible an then only change the mx and my of the BGMAP like this:

WORLD_MSET(ani_objects.bgMap,ani_objects.mx,ani_objects.mp,ani_objects.my);

That’s much faster. If you use repeating 8×8 blocks in your sprites you can actually handle allot of Sprites this way.

Another fast way would be to modify where the memory is pointing instead of copying new sprites to the memory. I have never done this though.

If all of this doesn’t make sense to you I probably didn’t understand what happens in your code. In that case just ignore this.

Because then it would look like shit. I never got why game labels have to be overloaded with useless information.

It is irrelevant in which country I lived while programming the game. PlanetVB does not own the copyright, so there is no point in writing it on the card. The game is obviously a Virtual Boy game so why write it on the card? Finally, the the official code of the game is “VUE-VGHE-PD (TS)”. This is the only information that may belong on the card… but why ruin the the nice artwork with that kind of text if people can easily look that stuff up on the Internet or on the Box?

That’s only my point of view though.

@thunderstruck – James Rolfe (AVGN) hates the Virtual Boy, he truly does. Why would you send him a game for a console that he hates? He didn’t even want that copy of Jack Bros. that he was sent for free.

I don’t know if he truly hates the Virtual Boy as I have never met him in person. All of his AVGN videos are over the top rants and don’t necessarily represent his opinion. If I ever meet him I will ask.

Even though his AVGN review is over the top, he has some fair points. It is nearly impossible to sit comfortable in front of it, the game-library is rather small and most of the games are mediocre. Finally, most of the games are not Virtual Reality.

I think most of his work is truly funny and inspiring. I wouldn’t be developing VB games today if he hadn’t made his VB AVGN video.

That said, I was sarcastic when I said that Tusker should donate the game to him.

UncleTusker wrote:
This looks awesome. Great work! Feel free to use the walrus as a character!

Thanks, a Walrus would make a great enemy. I have to talk to my Artist.

VBmills wrote:
Just had a go, great demo. This has got real potential.

As Ben said adjustable enemie speed would be nice. But other than that I think this is a winner. Well done you two.

Thanks, it is nice to see people like the demo after I have put countless hours into making it look as fluent as possible.

I will figure out the speed for all elements as soon as I build real levels.

Just donate it to James Rolfe.

It won’t find it way to eBay any time soon.

Feels good to be in the news again. 🙂

The game is actually called “Fishbone”. Ben somehow choose an misleading title for the thread.

I wasn’t sure how to place the sprites. It somehow loooked strange with the mountains on top of the fence. I placed the fence in front of the player to have a more challenging level. I can easily change that though. however, i like it better with fence infront of the player.

OK, here is a new version of the demo with the recent Bug fixed (hopefully).

The level-menu is faster now. However, I’m not a 100% happy with the result.

I also added level 3. However, it is a copy of level 1 with different back- and foregrounds. The final version will have a different set of enemies in this level.

I’m pretty much done for now, except for the credit screen and some other stuff. As soon as Ben is done with the Sprites for the last 2 levels I will continue and produce a new demo.

Attachments:

1. fishbone_demo.v0.2-1.zip

KR155E wrote:
The stage select screen has a little bug, which causes the music to play as soon and as long as I press the left or right button, but the stage items won’t move until I release the button.

Fixed, thanks.

KR155E wrote:
One more thing I noticed: In the Classic Phish level, the far background and the player/enemies scroll at the same speed, while the ground scrolls much faster. It would probably look much better if the ground and player/enemies scrolled at the same speed, and the background at a much slower speed.

I know. That’s why I said I will change that as soon as I build real levels.

– Speed it up a lot
– Make all the menu items start moving at the same time
– Scale the items down in size once they are moved to the background

Thanks for the feedback. I already though about speeding it up because it feels to slow. Shouldn’t be to complex. The items can’t start at the same time as the items change the layer. If they start at the same time there is not enough space to do the switching which makes it look wrong. Scaling would be cool. I had the affine stuff working once but it is not part of the engine and thereby will not make it to Fishbone.

morintari wrote:
I must of played FB on the emulator for 45 min. Nice work Thunder and V-Ben. It’s great to know that an artist can have an idea and a programmer is willing to flesh it out into a playable game. Kudos to you both.

It is even better on Hardware 🙂

I found a little typo: “Revange of the fish” should be “Revenge of the fish”.

Fixed.