Hero (WIP)

Games!
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Well, I’m back at it on the 128k* (or more) only platform game inspired by our @TITAN 's graphics and plot of shennanigans in Ancient Greece. Implemented using the excellent CPCTeleraNext by the lovely @Arnaud6128.

I’ve given up trying to get smooth full-screen CRTC/memory based scrolling to work as smoothly and as simply as I want on a non-Plus machine, even both with analysing the timings manually, and letting an LLM loose on it, so I’ve moved things over to Flick Screen. So I can get the damned thing completed and out.

But this does mean I can concentrate instead on getting the movement of the player sprite as close as possible to what console games such as SMB etc do. Yes, I’m ripping off the Mario physics and movement/control model because why not:

Some screenshots, and yes, the menu/intro demo is in overscan. There are currently THREE seperate tunes courtesy of our @Targhan, and there will be support for multiple languages (so far planning English/Spanish/French/German and of course Greek for our Forum Grand Poohbah).

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Next up is ladder movement, spiky-and-gluggy-death handling, and enemies.

The tileset/graphics are all from here: AmstradMuseum TITAN : Devilry III

I’m using Tiled for the Levels. And yes, I’m using an LLM (ChatGPT) as a coding consultant and assistant to write tools, optimise code, grunt-worker and so on. Because I’ve been a professional software developer for 30-odd years and I’m utterly bored of reinventing the wheel with computers now. That said, I’ve been writing C on-and-off since 1997, so yeah, I know what I’m doing.

Please direct all complaints to the big AI Thread. But all artwork and music are by humans!

I’ll use this thread to keep you all updated on progress.

* No, it won’t run on 64K, you will need 128K (at least) and a disc drive. Yes, that’s deliberate. I was stuck with an unexpanded 464 back in the day, and the 6128 is still my dream machine.

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This looks amazing! The character’s jump seems a little…overpowered…at the moment maybe, but I love the graphics and the setting, and the other screens!

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Been looking forward to this, and it is indeed looking fantastic.

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Is the horizontal movement of the sprite per-pixel or per-byte? It’s hard to say without playing it of course, but looking at the video it seems like it could use a bit of horizontal momentum, and I guess 2 byte coordinate precision to go with it, if you were really going for the Mario feel.

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Yeah, it’s per byte horizontal movement. I dare not think about pixel-based movement, though I know it can actually be done.

The PC gravity/fall/acceleration values are ones I put in initially when I was being inspired by the various breakdowns of the SMB control systems that are online, but of course with a CPC flick screen, they are, as commented above, a bit too jumpy.

Tbh I was just chuffed to get the damn thing vaguely moving like a console game. What doesn’t help currently is that the levels are hand generated. I only have enough memory spare for each level (1 is loaded at a time) to be 8 screens wide, even with 128k! And thus with the current movement settings, they could feel cramped.

I might actually swap over to levels that are built out of much larger units. Or even proc gen. I saw an absolutely cracking breakdown on how this was done in a BBC-game on YouTube:

But the problem with this sort of thing is that levels are all very samey. On the other hand, I could do what I did with Reginald, and keep each screen compressed until needed, and only store persistent enemy sprites. That way only the current screen (40 x 22 tiles) is stored. And that’s easy to do with Flick Screen as opposed to the old Scrolling stuff I was using previously.

I honestly am all undecided on this all. Part of the reason for posting here was to get thoughts on all these ideas.

The current plan is to as soon as I have one playable level, to release that, in a form that is directly playable, ie without the menu or intro or so on, to get feedback on the controls, on the gameplay, hopefully so iterative improvements can be made.

And of course, all my code will be released under the GPL2 on Github when done.

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Are your (beautiful) screens being built up out of tiles?

There does seem to be a lot of tile re-use, and that is a good thing, because it means screens can be defined by quite a small amount of data.

Even better, you can define larger objects (“supertiles”), like columns.

Your screen definition can include data that says “in position (x,y) there is a column”, which can be done in 3 bytes. The code that builds up your screen can then recognise that there is a column to be drawn, and go to a separate table that holds the tile info for the column.

Let’s say that a column consists of a top tile, a series of identical middle tiles, and a bottom tile.
The column definition can be composed in a number of ways.

It could be just a list of tile numbers, or it could be a tile number followed by the number of times it is used. And then you would need to have a system to determine if the tiles are stored in vertical order, or left to right then top to bottom order etc.

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They’re currently hand-crafted, tile by tile, and it’s a right pain to create them!

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I’ve been following the game since the very beginning and it’s a super cool project. This is the typical game that could have been released during the golden age of the CPC — announced at Christmas with a fantastic cover in the magazine I used to buy at the newsstand (Micromanía in my case) and I definitely would have bought it.

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Interesting work thus far. Looking at the ingame graphics, I would suggest you guys rethink the black outlines that result in more or less every object to appear rigid and blocky, especially since you opted for the background to be brighter than the foreground.

Also, who is the guy in the first screenshot in relation with the guy in the last screenshot?

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You mean, Zeus screwing everything that moves?

This is looking awesome!

I’m moving it to the Games category btw.

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That’s our hero, Helios. Who has been a bit naughty and is being punished by the Gods, by being forced to be a Divine Errand Boy.

The graphics, I’m not an artist at all, so I’ll defer to my Right Honourable Friend @TITAN@Titan. I just try and make the pixels go vroom.

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Believe me, you can tie his story in any way imaginable regarding sex. Maybe he was eyeing some poor mortal girl, so Zeus condemned him to be a turtle or something but Hera intervened and transformed him before Zeus could find him so he’s now unrecognizable but she also took him under her wing so he now lives between Olympus and the normal world running errands.

Just saying.

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Well, seeing how entirely different Helios looks between the two pictures (the first one isn’t even close to wearing greek armour, and ancient greek art was part of my studies), I am suspecting those pics were likely ‘borrowed’ from other sources and transfered/recoloured for the CPC. In fact, the one in the title screen, the style, even looks too familiar; but I can’t recall where I’ve seen a similar illustration.

The reason I’m not suspecting AI in this case is that, nowadays you can ask AI to redraw the same thing in different positions and it does a fairly good job without hallucinating too much.

When commenting on graphics, I have a somewhat negative attitude towards pics that are copies without mentioning original authors, and Titan has been tagging a lot of pics that are not his, with his sig. So, I suppose the easy fix would be to be brave, disclose and move on. It’s not a sin to borrow things, or use AI, as long as one is honest about it; a lot of people have been doing this on the CPC (but at the same time, others aren’t; even a few really famous ones, which is shameful and unethical at the same time).

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I’m just the programmer, guv’nor. I will leave that sort of argument to you artistic types. :joy:

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What sort of levels would you want to see in Hero?
  • Handcrafted Smaller Levels
  • Larger Building-Block Levels
  • Massive Proc-Gen Levels
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I dont find ‘guv’nor’ fitting, but you may call me god if you want.

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Yes, my Grand Poobah

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Better. Keep it up.

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Quick pick up n play, please. With progress saving, if possible.

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Yes. Plan is to have, on the second side of the FSK, a version that launches you straight into the game, no menu, no intro, no title screen, nothing. Just the game play.

And I’m planning to use access codes to allow progress to be stored, as it were.

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