And yet again a bigger step.

Of course we need lots of goodies from the killed enemies. We add items. Items are displayed as 2x2 block of characters. There's a new list of possible items with location added (ITEM_ACTIVE, etc.). The list also stores the original background behind the items.

To get a…

One of the more complex steps. And also one I someday need to heavily optimize. The player can now shoot an enemy.

The central function for this is FireShot. We don't use a bullet but insta-shot. However walls should block the shot as well. This means, we need to take the current player direction a…

From colliding to dying is a small step. Once the player collides with an enemy we kill him by removing the player object. A "Press Fire to Restart" message is displayed and a press on the button will revive the player object.

We add the function RemoveObject which simply removes the object from th…

So you found out the enemies couldn't hurt you? Well, we're working towards that goal in this step. We add collision checks. Since I'm not completely sure about later changes we are NOT relying on the VICs collision checks but roll our own. Remember the object size contraints from step #6? We apply…

What are enemies if they just sit put and don't move at all? Therefore we now add the sub routine ObjectControl. ObjectControl loops through all objects (even the player) and jumps to the behaviour function depending on the object type. This incurs that the behaviour is tied to the object type. …

Of course a game isn't a game without some challenge. Therefore we need enemies. Since we have some neat little level build code why not use it for enemies as well?

We add a new level primitive type LD_OBJECT which adds objects (= sprites). We use it for both player and enemies. A new table SPRITE_…

Now it's starting to resemble a game. Loosely.

In this step we add gravity and jumping. The player will fall if there is no blocking char below. On joystick up the player jumps in a curve.
Both fall speed and jump speed are non linear and based on tables.

This step shows:
-gravity (accelerating)
-j…

And onwards we go: Obviously we don't want the player to move through walls. In this step we check the chars in the players way to see if they are blocking.

To make this easier we store the character pos and the character delta pos (0 to 7) for x and y for every sprite (SPRITE_CHAR_POS…

Our next big step:

Obviously we want some play screen, and more obviously, we are not going to store full screens (we've got only 64Kb Ram after all). Therefore there's a level build routine that allows to build a screen with various building elements. For now we'll start out with vertical and …

Now we take a bigger step: Moving the sprite with the joystick. Since we want to make a real game we also allow to move the sprite over to the right side (in other words we'll take care of the extended x bit).

For clarification: The C64 has 8 hardware sprites. That's 8 objects of the size 24 x …

Quite similar to step 2 this time we set up sprites. Note that I used another selfmade tool (similar to SpritePad). The file J.SPR contains the sprites and is included into the source as binary. The sprites are located "under" the I/O ROM at $D000 onwards.

And another note: Since I'm l…

And onwards we stumble!

In the first part we prepared everything for the VIC, now we set up our modified charset. Note that I used a selfmade tool (similar to CharPad), which is included (Windows binary). The file J.CHR contains the charset and is included into the source as binary. The memory layo…

As threatened the first step detailed. I reckon that the first step is overwhelming if it's your first voyage into C64 game programming. There's quite a few assumptions made about the viewer's knowledge and the later steps won't get exactly easier.

A note about the !zone macro. ACME allows…

Welcome!

Today's development is heaps and bounds beyond imagination from 20 years ago. I've always had a soft spot for the C64 after all this years. So I sat down and tried to start assembly programming on a C64.

Today I'll start with a sort of tutorial on how to write a C64 game. I have prepared 36 …