Strangel 2

[Sendy The Endless]

This is definitely Strangel II taking shape... The possibilities to make something just as surreal and strange but more friendly to the player are presenting themselves to me.

I'm using JSW64 Variant X, and I was just porting over some of my favourite sprites from my other JSW games and I noticed that there are considerably less sprite sheet pages in JSW64 than in JSW128... That's when I made the discovery of the extra sprite pages in each room's data! There's 18 sprites you can have PER ROOM that don't need to be in any other room; that's enough for two unique bi-directional horizontal guards PLUS a portal graphic with change left over! I knew portals could use these graphics, but SO CAN GUARDIANS!

Anything specific to a room, for example, scenery and sprite-based static nasties, cobwebs, slime, etc can go in these room slots, and you can save the main guardian table for the mainstay enemies that will appear more frequently.

This also means, if you want to do a uni-directional horizontal enemy, instead of wasting a main sprite page for it, just to have a blank sprite for one direction of travel, you can just copy the sprite you want to uni-direction-ify to this room data sprite screen and make the blanks, leaving the original guardian without a ton of empty space wasting up the sprite bank.

Also, what I call "gimmick guardians", like things designed to phase through certain block graphics or otherwise fit into a room for a unique challenge, are perfect for this extra room memory. There's, like, SO much space in each room and you can even make more by playing with the guardian table length... It's taken me a while to get my head around this feature of JSWED, but last night I finally realized the implications for this are big : )

Edited April 1, 2023 by Sendy The Endless
More rambling

[Spider]

That's looking very good. 🙂

[Sendy The Endless]

More of the castle area

[Spider]

The fountains are a nice touch. 🙂

[Sendy The Endless]

7 hours ago, Spider said:

The fountains are a nice touch. 🙂

 

Thanks, not too difficult to jump over either ; )

[MtM]

I like the fountains too. Is MW going to be a different colour on every screen?

 

[Spider]

16 hours ago, MtM said:

Is MW going to be a different colour on every screen?

Diversity ? 🙂

[Sendy The Endless]

Yes, I'm aiming for dark colours and light backgrounds, but in a few rooms he's regular white flavour ; )

Like this room for example. This ring a bell with any C64 heads? : )))

Real tribute to my childhood here. I used to play Game Maker all the time on the Commode, even though you could only design one screen and the collision detection with platforms was horrendous lol

 

[Sendy The Endless]

Just a little update in my chronicles of making this... yesterday I realized I was building the game in the wrong variant of JSW64. Specifically, I was using variant X which has 64 rooms (and a ton of free space in each room), instead of variant V (AKA the best variant ; ) which has 128 rooms but no room for custom sprites in the room definition. So I had to export/import all the rooms, sprites, and specifically the room specific "gimmick sprites", and then import them into the main sprite pages of the variant V engine (V doesn't have enough memory in each room for guardian sprite pages, just enough for a portal graphic or some code). Then of course I had to set up all the guardians again to point to the right sprite pages as per the import.

There's a bug in JSWED where batch exporting rooms from variant X to variant V causes every other room to go missing, so I had to export each room manually. I also noticed that all my items were missing in-game, despite appearing in JSWED, but thankfully that was sorted out by simply deleting and re-instancing the items.

Currently I have 29 rooms created. Still plenty of space in the sprite memory for more guardians, but those uni-directional guardians really eat into memory... if only there was support for uni-directional guardians that use a blank frame for either their left or right travel, without having to waste this space... it feels so... extravagent lol

I've also altered the byte in the FFxx region of memory which tells the skylabs to move 8 to the right after each crash. I've fixed that to zero so I can have droplets at the expense of sacrificing skylabs. Seems like a fair trade to me, although I know there's a way to get both types in one game by hacking the guardian definitions, I'm just not on that level of hacking yet : )

Edited April 10, 2023 by Sendy The Endless
More dogs

[Spider]

16 hours ago, Sendy The Endless said:

yesterday I realized I was building the game in the wrong variant

I do get a bit confused with the options, at first many moons ago I did not understand why there were so many, but it does make a bit of sense after studying the chart, so they can be compared to decide if you want more/less guardians/features/rooms. In essence (although as you know there's a fair bit more to it than this) , from the .pdf with 2.3.7:

16 hours ago, Sendy The Endless said:

There's a bug in JSWED where batch exporting rooms from variant X to variant V causes every other room to go missing, so I had to export each room manually. I also noticed that all my items were missing in-game, despite appearing in JSWED, but thankfully that was sorted out by simply deleting and re-instancing the items.

I have had odd quirks before with absent rooms, I think in my case (it was quite a while ago) I chose to export perhaps a dozen or two rooms, and some of them appeared. It might be worth letting John Elliot know about this in case he one day plans any updates. AFAIK the last update was 2015 (or 2012, not sure) , he does have an account here but I'm not sure if you decided to contact him if a PM here or an email via his site would be best.