After a few weeks of generally enjoying the summer hols - and a little recreational maths
, I have set my somewhat rested braincells to my little piece of this grand effort once again.All the levels for this game are going to have to be pre-designed, unlike the randomly generated ones in my prototype, since there just isn't the space within a Beeb for all the storage required to check for 'doability'.(My apologies to my colleagues in the English dept. for making up words again.)
To this end, I have written a level designer which runs on my pc and so far have 5 levels of increasing difficulty set up.
The next task was coming up with a way to store them in the Beeb.
Since each 'cell' can be either empty or 1 of 4 colours, I have used 4 bits for each one, compressing each level to 120 bytes. Not too bad. I tried more complex compression techniques to try to bring this down but almost always the overheads involved left me with bigger chunks of data.
For now I shall stick with it as it is. Depending on how relatively complex I can make each level, I may resort to making them of different sizes, but this will also depend on how much space I have once the alpha version is up and running.
The obstacle which I now have to climb over is one of designing the graphics.
My initial idea was to have each 'box' in the van labelled with a company logo, (Acorn,CBM &c.) and then found that there are surprisingly few which come nicely squeezable into an 8x16 Mode 2 square. I have also tried recreating a Beeb,a Speccy &c into a character, and using game characters, but it always ends up a little hard to see where everything is compared to the 'joined-up' look of the prototype.
I shall experiment a little more then I shall probably post some pics to garner opinion on the matter.
All of this I shall try to squeeze around trying to get my head around using DFS from ASM for my MazezaM level designer -(and trying to come up with a set of supremely evil set of levels to hopefully challenge even Michael, although trying to do this for someone who is better at it than I am is proving somewhat challenging) - and having 'one last go' on Tom's wonderful Linux version of Atomulator . . . again!
Kian
