Hello everyone,
For some time now (about 2 years), I’ve been working on and off on a space game for the CPC 6128. It’s meant to be in the spirit of the classic ELITE. You can’t actually play it yet, just interact with the 3D engine. The 3D graphics are written in Assembly. Everything else around it is in C.
The round thing is supposed to be a planet currently illuminated by its sun. (No, there isn’t a sun yet, but it’s planned as a screen-filling white disc). The triangle is another spaceship. The square thing is a space station.
Currently, there are always three spaceships circling the area (around the player). You can move around in space. Nothing else yet. Well, actually: shoot with Space. The screen shake is intentional. Later on, that’s supposed to indicate that you’ve been hit. I drew the cockpit with a paint program. It’s just a draft, made especially for this showcase.
orbital.dsk (190,3 KB)
(run"orbital")
The key bindings:
w
asd SPACE and arrow keys.
x
w=Accelerate, s=Brake, x=Stop, Space=Fire, and so on…
The mockup still has many bugs:
- You cannot fly indefinitely far. Suddenly there’s a stop. That’s where we break my coordinate system (a numeric overflow would follow).
- Some spaceships are 2-4 pixels in size and bam, suddenly they’re close. Same in the opposite direction. I’ve been hunting this bug for months… At least the game stays stable now!
- The radar circle (oval) isn’t completely symmetrical. Actually, it is! I’m just setting one dark blue pixel too many. These are precisely the little things that take an awful lot of work to fix.
Have fun checking it out. I welcome comments on what could be improved, but please keep in mind that this is an 8-bit computer. I also don’t have an idea yet of what the player’s objective could be. It can’t be a shooter, as the graphics are probably too slow for that. Right now, I’m also out of ideas on what should / could / must be displayed in the cockpit. But I’m sure that will come along as development continues.
(Please don’t be sad if I take a longer break from this project. I made the mistake of developing another game in parallel. The advantage is that you can always jump back and forth between projects whenever you get stuck. But it also slows you down. (My two games “Asteroids” and “Sternenschwarm” technically influenced each other as well.)
Cheers,
S.D.
