Chuckie Egg 2 remake on L System - progress update

[cmonkey]

So, time for an update. Henhouse Harry is nothing more than a finite state machine. He's programmed to respond to 9 different states as follows :-

0 - falling

1 - walking horizontally/stood still on solid ground

2 - walking on a horizontal slippery pipe

3 - climbing/descending a ladder or chain

4 - sliding down a vertical slippery pipe

5 - walking up a ramp

6 - sliding down a ramp

7 - jumping

8 - riding on a lift

I've now implemented 6 of Harry's 9 states, just ramps (up and down) and lifts to implement. It's starting to look a little bit like a game, more importantly it plays EXACTLY the same as the Spectrum version of the game. All the little peculiarities of the Spectrum version of the game exist my remake meaning that it FEELS exactly like playing it on an NTSC Spectrum.

I also tried my hand at creating a multi-coloured version of Harry's sprite set to see how he would look. I'm not the world's greatest pixel artist but I don't think I did too bad a job of it. It's awkward because of the fact that there are 4 different background coloured rooms in the game (black, red, blue and mageneta) and to create a multi-coloured sprite that stands out in all those different background colours is not easy.

Anyway, have a look at the latest videos (I ran out of room on my phone SD card whilst creating the video so had to delete some crap and finish it off in the second video!) and let me know if you have any questions.

 

[Hurray Banana]

Nice explanation of a state machine Ade. This is coming along nicely.

I know exactly how lovely managing the possible transitions is

I like the talk through maybe I should do that when I release my next videos.

 

[backflipper]

Brilliant work.

Loving the updates and especially the explanations on how the software side of things work.

 

[Sokurah]

I too have been laying low for a couple of months recently. Hopefully things are looking up now. Phew. ...so it's nice to see something interresting when I finally come back to here.

Great work Ade. It's beginning to look like something. Yay.

As I said in my recent mail to you I'm dropping my scrolling game for the L System and once I find the time I'll come up with something that doesn't scroll instead. I don't know when it'll be though...but hopefully this year.

 

[cmonkey]

Good to see you back my friend

This place needs more coders like you.

 

[Purity]

Very good work Ade!

 

[cmonkey]

By my own admission I'm a truly awful pixel artist. I'm not a bad coder but I have zero talent when it comes to pixel art. So it was a very nice surprise when I was contacted by a long standing member of the 'VAC last week, offering to 'spruce' up the look of my CE2 remake. I'm not going to reveal who he is, I'll let him do that, should he choose to do so (I'm pretty sure he will). Take a look at what he can do....

It's very likely I'll give the player the option of choosing between the original tile/sprite set and this amazing new look for Harry!

 

[Hurray Banana]

very good

 

[shoestring]

Great work. It's going to be paithful to the original once it's done.

I can't wait to get involved in some of my own homebrew projects.

 

[muddymusic]

That's some nice work! Really pleased to see the progress on this recently, keep it up chaps

 

[Sokurah]

That's awesome. The Speccy version pales in comparison.
Great that you now actually have a chance to utilize the better graphics of the L System.

 

[ben76]

Looks great

- Ben

 

[grobda]

Rusty mediocre pixel artist

Cheers for the kind words, I offered to do some graphics as the speccy was hardly a powerhouse in that department and I thought it would be nice to tart them up a bit. I've done bits of pixel art over the years; proud moment when I got one published in C&VG. More recently I redrew some sprites that were used in the STE pacmania remake.

After some patient explanation from cmonkey It became clear I couldn't just draw whatever I liked as the tiles are 8x8 and there's 'only' 4096 available on the hardware.

I've done a few more backgrounds and tried to make them simpler and more pattern based, and align them with an 8x8 grid so that more tiles can be repeated;

The first 4 pics show the revisions to the first screens I drew in order to lower the amount of tiles used in each pic to something the hardware might actually be capable of storing. Once I knew this I drew the bottom 4 pics aligned to a grid and made them more like repeating tile patterns (conveyor for storage area, chimney for egg smelter area, pipes for egg machine area, underground-style for train area. They're all works in progress to a greater or lesser extent (hey when is a work of art ever finished

)

I've struggled to get a consistent style as I've discovered the potential and limits of the system, originally my thinking was to use a forced perspective to give depth and seperation from foreground objects. unfortunately this makes it quite tile-intensive so I experimented with other ideas.

Really hoping to get it finished and implemented but whatever happens it's fun to tinker with. Massive respect to cmonkey for his coding skills and patience

great to see my graphics in action.

 

[silverfox0786]

wowowowowowowowow

 

[Hurray Banana]

like the pipework and the brick chimmney

 

[Alpha1]

Guys this is AMAZEBALLS!!!!

 

[cmonkey]

like the pipework and the brick chimmney

Amazingly the brick chimney reduces to just 15 distinct tiles when I run it through my tile culling application, which removes duplicate tiles from an image.

Thanks a million for your continued work on this Rick

Expect the work requests to start flooding in soon!

 

[Hurray Banana]

Great work. I love it when data organisation makes cool things possible

 

[ben76]

You're all clever buggers in my book

- Ben