Wow, it’s been hard work and still no end in sight yet. There are lots of little things to sort out before the game’s ready. But the good news is that all the level data and graphics are complete. It’s mostly a case of tidying and cleaning up now, plus dealing with some bugs that just decided to rear their ugly heads.
Rather than allowing infinite continues, which would make the game too easy to just get to the end of, decided to have a continue system similar to the PC Engine and Saturn versions of the game. When you reach certain stages, you’ll be given an extra continue. You’ll also be able to start from those stages rather than from the beginning every time. Added a little menu system to allow selection of the stages, and also the amount of lives to start with. Took a few weeks to finish the code, as the more I thought about it, the more it turned into a general menu selection system (which wasn’t strictly necessary).
I had not bothered to show the stage names before each stage started, only the stage number. Thought it would be nice to put that in, same as the arcade. That was more work than I expected too. It’s a nice big 16×16 font (see picture above), but with the whole alphabet and numbers included, it won’t fit into the amount of 8×8 characters allowed in one character set by the Atari (128). There are a surprising amount of repeated graphics in the characters though. For example the top left 8×8 character of the 8,B,E and G in the picture above is the same. It took a while but I wrote a little program to turn a picture of the complete font into 8×8 characters avoiding duplicate characters – A kind of simple pattern matching data compression.
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