Cuboid Captor

[hikoki]

I may be wrong about how the gameplay works
- The Cuboid goes directly towards the player unless he steers it by feeding it with gems.
- Gems make the Cuboid Viator move in a predictable way (cannot go straight, gem colour sequence, alternate always-turn-to-right with always-turn-to-left, etc)
- To win the game, all gems have to be taken either by the player or the cuboid.
- To win the game, you have to find the exit of the maze.
- To win the game, both you and the Cuboid have to reach the exit. So you have to steer the Cuboid to the exit as well. Suppose the Cuboid is a sort of King Kong that you want to bring to your circus in York.
- You explore the game by exchanging gems with ropes which allow you a temporary minimap-view of the maze.
- The more gems you take the higher the score you get.
Another idea could be to ask the player to enter a hiscore minimum, gameover happening when this score can't be reached in the game, the score would be indicated by a countdown to the minimum. This mode could add replayability and would force the player to take risks and think of ways to solve the maze by wasting fewer gems.

[Ivanzx]

Welcome to the fórums and the ZX Dev´, PROSM!
I first must say that I have been always intrigued by these type of games in the Spectrum. Last year I bought Skull:

www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004553

and it looks similar in concept to your game, although with not as good graphics as yours (I may be wrong and the playability is different, after all!)
I liked this Skull game, and I really think that, even if its nice one, it could be improved in some details which would make it even better.
So I am looking forward to seeing this one completed!

[hikoki]

Very cool sceneries, Rui! It'd be cool to have several styles in the game to make it more pleasant and add variability.
Suggestion: Could you make all in black with the walls in black and yellow, gems as if lightening up the walls, the ground in black. A full moon in a starless sky in black degrading to dark blue, a full moon without textures, a stripe in the middle in bright blue as the remaining of the day. A very tron-esque scene. Another day we may talk about a Doom-esque scenery withh hellish mountains and poisonous soil.

[rmartins]

Feb 18, 2016 18:14:14 GMT hikoki said:

Very cool sceneries, Rui! It'd be cool to have several styles in the game to make it more pleasant and add variability.
Suggestion: Could you make all in black with the walls in black and yellow, gems as if lightening up the walls, the ground in black. A full moon in a starless sky in black degrading to dark blue, a full moon without textures, a stripe in the middle in bright blue as the remaining of the day. A very tron-esque scene. Another day we may talk about a Doom-esque scenery withh hellish mountains and poisonous soil.

You can try it yourself, hikoki. I gave links to image files in previous posts.

NOTE: This game is PROMs work, I just gave some graphical suggestions.

[PROSM]

Right now, I'm ironing out the bugs in the renderer. It is mostly finished and the next thing to code will either be control setup or gameplay logic. I have decided to use the black vertical lines as suggested by Rui. This is because lighting in different directions is not intended as this would complicate the renderer and also because the other suggestions such as the wall patterns would require some pixel map rendering which can not occur due to lack of buffer for the pixel map.

Feb 4, 2016 16:24:50 GMT hikoki said:

I may be wrong about how the gameplay works

You enter the maze with the Cuboid Captor in the opposite corner of the maze. You must navigate through the maze whilst avoiding the Captor.

Blue gems can be collected and serve two purposes; they can be used to view the local map for a limited time or they can be used as markers . You can enter the maze with gems, with the amount of gems depending on the skill level you selected before the game. The red gems could be separate entities which serve different purposes. They could be used to lure the Cuboid Captor. They would not be obtained in the normal way. Instead, blues could be converted to reds with the press of a key and vice versa.

If you manage to get out of the maze, a final score would be calculated based on the amount of gems you have. A bonus which would decrease over time could be added which would give an incentive to finish the maze on time.

[Deleted]

Looks really nice!

Dungeon crawlers back in the day used to have 3 levels of depth: "playing" area (where the player can interact with objects), +1 and +2. The used light to avoid drawing walls that are too far away.

See for example Bloodwych: www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0000592

You can search for tiles, for example for Dungeon Master, for a great example of that.

But as I said your screens look really nice!

[hikoki]

@rui
I gave it a try. Variability in sceneries on every play could be nice. Maybe the moon should be gigantic sometimes.




@prosm
I guess you are on the most fun and crucial stage of development.

[PROSM]

Feb 20, 2016 19:36:19 GMT hikoki said:

@rui
I gave it a try. Variability in sceneries on every play could be nice. Maybe the moon should be gigantic sometimes.

The first picture on your post is actually impossible on the ZX Spectrum due to colour limitations where only two colours can be present in each 8x8 character that makes up the screen. I've decided on a graphics style for the game now and it is more detailed than the previous images. Here it is:



Rui's patterns, while very detailed and stylish, required pixel map modification to correct the perspective when a flat wall appeared. Flat colours could have been used for these but this would have introduced inconsistency. The pattern's data would have also taken up RAM which is needed for the Cuboid Captor's frames, various data structures and the rest of the game code.

Feb 20, 2016 19:36:19 GMT hikoki said:

@prosm
I guess you are on the most fun and crucial stage of development.

Crucial would be a good word, fun less so. Coding little parts of a game or coding 32 byte demos is fun but this is the first full game that I am releasing so the amount of work required is a bit more than I'm used to and in recent days it's become more tedious than fun.

[hikoki]

Ha! the dawn scene is not correct! pity you can't use the glowing blocks.. I imagine it'd be cool to see the bright cuboid appearing from nowhere in the dark. BTW the Cuboid moves around fast?
Cheer up, Prosm! You're gonna need courage to change code if some gameplay doesn't work as expected . This game can be a classic. Thanks for the discussion

[rmartins]

Feb 23, 2016 21:09:02 GMT PROSM said:

Feb 20, 2016 19:36:19 GMT hikoki said:

@prosm
I guess you are on the most fun and crucial stage of development.

Crucial would be a good word, fun less so. Coding little parts of a game or coding 32 byte demos is fun but this is the first full game that I am releasing so the amount of work required is a bit more than I'm used to and in recent days it's become more tedious than fun.

Don't despair, when it's finished you will get a very warm felling from having accomplished it.

Just keep on pressing and if you can, share what you are doing, if not online, with someone you may know.
It helps to have someone close by for feedback, when we are doing the mundane parts of coding.

Also a good tip, is to interleave the fun parts, with the not so fun parts, so that you can balance your motivation.

It's the typical 90/90 rule.
The last 10%, take another 90% of the time

[PROSM]

Following Rui's suggestion of interleaving the boring/hard parts with the fun parts, I have coded a small music player. Because the 16K Spectrum only has contended memory (shared with the ULA), no custom music code can be used since the timings will be inaccurate. This means that I have had to use the beep routine in ROM. As a result, the music is fairly limited and reminiscent of old BASIC type-in programs (you decide whether that is good or bad). I have composed two short themes so far to accompany various events in the game. You can download them by clicking on the following link: Cuboid Captor Music.zip (72.69 KB)

NOTE: You will need to be logged in to download the zip file since it is an attachment to my forum post.

[rmartins]

If you can make the player output sound as clean as those MP3, It will be very nice.

[PROSM]

Mar 2, 2016 15:46:32 GMT rmartins said:

If you can make the player output sound as clean as those MP3, It will be very nice.

Those MP3s are a recording of the player output 

[Ivanzx]

Liking the looks of thos, PROSM
How far are you in the development? Are you looking for someone to do an inlay cover?

[PROSM]

Mar 2, 2016 20:58:04 GMT Ivanzx said:

How far are you in the development?

I would say about 40% to 50% of the game is complete right now. The rendering engine is still being tweaked and the game logic is being written. Control setup is almost done and I just need to add a Kempston joystick option. Maze generation code has not been started yet and neither has highscore handling code, key checking code or score countup code.

Mar 2, 2016 20:58:04 GMT Ivanzx said:

Are you looking for someone to do an inlay cover?

While that is a kind offer, I have already produced an inlay cover as part of Rui's advice of interleaving fun and not-so-fun parts.

(This image is an attachment and can be downloaded if logged in)

I wanted to get a capture of the screen from my portable CRT to give the full 1980's feel but setting up the Spectrum would be too much hassle right now so I've just taken the image from an emulator.