menu beginnings

How about adding an option for number of lives to start with (1, 3, 5)
and bonus life option (every 1000; 2000; 5000; and no bonus).

I'd like to see a continue feature option as well (on/off). To let players continue on the last ramped up difficulty setting before the last game was over, and with the score reset to zero too.

The last option I were thinking of: since the tanks will have homing missile option, how about giving the humanoid a special move option (on/off)? I don't know what kind of special move yet. Maybe an evasive roll by holding the button down while double tapping forward or backward? Or be able to "lock" your aim? ie: the last aim the player had while stationary before letting go of the fire button will be the same fixed aim when firing while running in any direction. Just some ideas.

Lives, Bonus Life and Continue sound good. For continue I'll be able to reuse the menu graphic and display it over the room via 4 flickering sprites in a row, with a 9 to 0 countdown below it.

Not sure on the special move, will have to think on it. Memory constraints are going to be an issue soon.

 SIZE OF SAMPLES =  $e9c
 ------ $800 bytes of ARM User Code left
 ------ $54  bytes free for BANK 4 'DPC+ overlap' ARM data storage
 ------ $901 bytes of BANK 4 ROM left
 ------ $6c  bytes free for BANK 5 'DPC+ overlap' ARM data storage
 ------ $6d4 bytes of BANK 5 ROM left
 ------ $11d bytes of Display Data RAM/ROM overlap left for ROM
 ------ $64 bytes of Display Data RAM left
 ------ $60 bytes of Display Data ROM left

Exactly 2K left in the ARM space. That's not going to go very far though as ARM code is bigger than 6507 code. There's another 3.5K of space in there if I drop the speech samples.

Almost 4K left in banks 4 & 5 (6507 space). That's where the robot and special object graphics will end up. I'd also like to add a high-score screen w/AtariVox support for saving it (as well as speech of course!). Not sure how much room that'll take, and it needs to be in banks 4 or 5.

481 bytes left in Display Data. The main menu graphics and any additional variables for the ARM (such as variables to prevent the robots from shooting 2 times in succession, which causes both shots to go away) will go here. One nice thing is the graphics for the main menu can overlap variables that are used while the game is running(the $11d), but variables holding things like "bonus life setting" can't overlap as they must be maintained between bouts.

I updated the blog entry with some new screenshots.

Oh my. You beat me to it.

I were about to send you a revised menu mockup.

Anyway, thought I suggest a 2-page title screen instead of a single page screen with all the listed options overpowering the title itself.
I'll post you the mocks anyway for you to look at shortly since you plan to do more revisions.

Hmm. That it does. I don't think there's enough ROM left for the new graphics in your mockups It probably would make the most sense to eliminate the Last Bout & Score from the main menu and center the menu in the space that's left. Maybe modify the title a bit with a few lines below it that "expand upward" to draw more attention to the title?

F R A N T I C
  ----------
    ------  
      --  

Well, the lines take up a lot more room when using text (they should probably only increase the height of the title graphic by 1/4 or so), but I think you get the idea

added another menu update that I did during my lunch break.

SpiceWare, on Wed Sep 14, 2011 9:04 AM, said:

if you need a hand optimising your C code to make it more efficient on ARM give me a shout.

I just might take you up on that. Thanks!