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I made a simple Tower demo!

Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2021 12:55 am
by CurlyPaul


Still a long way to go, but imagine it with the each row running at a slightly different speed, and the xPos of each row undulating :)


It's using a heatmap(?) of sorts to draw the colours.. a single row of pixels is defined in memory, with the first three bits of each pixels data available for me to specify brightness, and the last one reserved to toggle between purple and blue...

So darkest blue in palette idx 0000, and the darkest purple is in 1000, the second darkest blue is in 0001, and the next purple in 1001, and so on. It worked pretty well in terms of making it easy to calculate what colour I should be drawing the squares, but I'm not yet sure how I can draw pixel A and B in different colours to each other, I've got some ideas though!

This has been immense fun so far

The code if anyone is interested. It's hugely wasteful, but my next task is to stream line as much as a I can
https://github.com/CurlyPaul/cpc-z80-twisting-tower

Re: I made a simple Tower demo!

Posted: Sun Jul 11, 2021 3:37 am
by akuyou
That looks fantastic!... You said you're looking to optimize it more... are you planning to turn it into a game?

I remember there was a cpc game with a tower effect... but I can't remember the name!

Re: I made a simple Tower demo!

Posted: Sun Jul 11, 2021 12:18 pm
by CurlyPaul
akuyou wrote: Sun Jul 11, 2021 3:37 am That looks fantastic!... You said you're looking to optimize it more... are you planning to turn it into a game?

I remember there was a cpc game with a tower effect... but I can't remember the name!
Thank you!!

Probably not a game, but I'm going to set to music and make it do more interesting things... hopefully you'll see a demoscene release featuring a shiny tower one day :)

Been working it over a lot and actually just breached 30fps by using ldir to copy each row of the blocks, rather than to calculate it. Seems obvious with hindsight.. still more to squeeze out but I need to repurpose the registers so that I can detangle it further and real life is calling.

The game you are thinking of is Nebulus, which I'd never heard of but everyone I've showed ilrhis to has mentioned it to me lol

Re: I made a simple Tower demo!

Posted: Sun Jul 11, 2021 12:23 pm
by CurlyPaul
I can't thank you enough for explaining all of this in a way that I understood.

I've only done the beginner series, I still need to look at the pixel plotting, screen mirroring, border rupture and full screen mode tutorials. I'll be well on my way to demoscene god once I've absorbed those :)

Re: I made a simple Tower demo!

Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2021 4:19 pm
by YQN
akuyou wrote: Sun Jul 11, 2021 3:37 am That looks fantastic!... You said you're looking to optimize it more... are you planning to turn it into a game?

I remember there was a cpc game with a tower effect... but I can't remember the name!
I guess you're thinking about Nebulus? https://youtu.be/aI2UHTT18bs?t=55

Re: I made a simple Tower demo!

Posted: Sat Dec 04, 2021 2:39 am
by CurlyPaul
YQN wrote: Mon Aug 23, 2021 4:19 pm
akuyou wrote: Sun Jul 11, 2021 3:37 am That looks fantastic!... You said you're looking to optimize it more... are you planning to turn it into a game?

I remember there was a cpc game with a tower effect... but I can't remember the name!
I guess you're thinking about Nebulus? https://youtu.be/aI2UHTT18bs?t=55
Everyone said this, but I'd not actually heard of the game until I showed people this video! The Nubulus tower is pretty impressive.

The inspiration was this video below which explains their tower very well.

https://youtu.be/gRzKAe9UtoU