Coding Adventures with the ZX Spectrum

12-31-2017
As we last stood, our enemy sprites, move at one speed toward the player. However, most games will over time start to speed up the enemy movements. Doing this is rather simple, but it needs to be done in order to increasingly change the difficulty.

We don’t really want to change how the main game loop runs, what we want to concentrate on is how the enemies move. Quick hint, it will not be with a pause statement of any sort, that will just freeze everything with each run of the loop.

What we want to do is vary the number of times that the enemy is called to pursue you. Continue reading “I’m feeling a movement part 4 – Hurry up and slow it down”

12-29-2017
Well, we last wrote about the logic that the demo used to make the enemies bounce all around the screen.

And then, I unceremoniously deleted it.

I just didn’t want enemies to bounce all over the screen, what I wanted was to have your enemies pursue you.

Continue reading “I’m feeling a movement part 3 – Artifical Stupidity”

12-28-2017
Warning: If you have a headache brewing, then don’t read this article, as it may cause confusion.

Now, let’s get down to the logical meat of the enemy movement. At a quick glance, can anyone tell me the logic by looking and the below code?

Continue reading “I’m feeling a movement part 2 – Pretzel logic”

12-27-2017

This next section, I think is going to take a while to fully compose, in fact, I think this is going to take several sections. Moving our enemy sprites.

When we are referring to the enemy movement, there is a loop that goes through each enemy sprite and it’s a complex little loop.

The code to which I am referring is below.

Continue reading “I’m feeling a movement part 1 – Exploratory Surgery”

12-26-2017

I noticed a little something about the demo code for FASE, when Antonio had defined a function, he had placed at the top of his code a reference to the function instead of the actual function itself.

Me in my extremely finite wisdom, thought, why is he doing it that way, that’s not how everyone else does it…..

Continue reading “Well, that’s not how everyone else does it.”

12-25-2017
When I emailed Antonio, we had discussed several items. I am writing about them one at I time as I explore their significance. The last item I detailed was the placement of the main players sprite. This time however, we will discuss a mystery array near the start of the code.
Continue reading “Mystery array solved”

12-24-2017
So Jimmy Buffet did not sing Changes in Latitude and Changes in Longitude…

In a prior blog post, I had toyed around with the main character placement, noting the placement was in hexadecimal.
Continue reading “Moving the Main character placement to a function, or How Jimmy Buffet helps me program.”

12-23-2017
Did I mention that I dislike Hexidecimal?

Continue reading “The I hate Hex conversion table”