Wumperdinkle Sniy

I redesigned all the levels in the Hamburgers game for the Game Gear. I think I'm done with that game. I went back to work to see if I could get rid of the scanline issue I had with Fruit Fly Fun for the Atari 2600. I think I did. I played it on an Atari 7800 and I was surprised that a 6 button Genesis controller works, only fire is B. So now I'll continue work on some of my other projects. Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Excuse me if this isn't the right place to discuss Atari 2600 homebrew, but I have been making one, working on it off and on for a few years, and haven't gotten any feedback or anything on it. If you could download and play mine and give feedback on the game, it would be wonderful. The game is called "Uncle Hairy's Nosehair" and you can download it and find instructions here on the official page.

I can't believe it's been over a month since I last posted here. Time really flies by. I finished two games: Stupidman (NES) and Flying Hamburgers (GG). Decided to go back to work on a game that I don't need very good artistic skills to work on. That would be the Odyssey 2. I worked some on a new minigame where the object is to get the Ps and avoid the Os. It needs more work for me to be happy with it, but I'm at a good stopping point so I'll stop and rest for a bit now. This is the last minigame I think I can fit in the game. Then it will be 8k. I'd like to make a 16k game one day but I don't know how. So I'll leave it at 8k. Since I don't have any ideas for more minigames as well. All my creations seem like just little doodles of mine that can move around. If I ever get this finished and released, I'd like to make a 12-page manual, two pages for each minigame and then two extra pages for something else.

I have been working on a video game for the Sega Game Gear called Flying Hamburgers. It's like "Hamburgers En Route To Switzerland" but with some differences. I am wanting to make this the best video game I've ever made so I'm working and working and working on it. It is 128 KB (so far). Right now I'm working on level 5. So I'm trying my best to compose good sounding background songs for each of the levels. I'm trying my best to make good graphics. And I'm trying my best to make the game engaging and fun. It's a lot like R-Type, where the flying hamburgers shoots French fries at the various junk food enemies that also can shoot foodstuff. Making Game Gear music is hard because there's basically one instrument you can use over 3 channels (and fourthly, one "noise" channel which can emit white noise which if you're really good at you can make it sound like cymbals. I am not that talented yet.) So I can't, say, make a flute and a piano playing at the same time. So I have to take that into consideration when I'm composing. Actually, I have 2 channels available for in-game music: Channels 0 and 1. Channels 2 and 3 are reserved for sound effects. You don't have to do it that way, I just chose to. I hope to finish this sometime next year.

So I have been doing a lot of work recently. I picked back up the X Vs. O game I was making for the Odyssey 2 and added a few more things. I added a win counter to the tic-tac-toe game, I added in the Cedar Games logo splash screen, and now I'm working on a Whack-an-O game. That is what the last picture is. No game play has been added yet. But I will add O's to whack and X's to not whack hopefully soon. I was really sleepy after getting up at 10p.m. so I went to sleep at around 4:30a.m. When I woke up, it was after 5. I went into the living room and it was dark in there. To my surprise, I discovered that it wasn't 5 a.m., but 5 p.m.! I had just slept for about 12 hours, which, while easy for me to do, I wasn't expecting to do that after only being awake for 6 1/2 hours. I guess I'm really sleepy and as a result, I sleep much more than a normal person would. At any given time, you could say, "Hey, Wumperdinkle, go to sleep!" and I would be able to. I know it's probably not good for my health, but I lose weight more if I'm not eating anything, lol. I made some more webcomics. To last until the end of the year. I'll continue into the next year. I've been doing them since 2006! Various comic series. I find it easier to make ones where there's no recurring characters, and it's just a gag. I call that one "Jukebox Quiz." Right now though I'm focusing on one about a zamboni driver and his wife called "The Life of a Zamboni Driver."

Today I composed the final two songs I needed and put them in the game. And now it's finished. Stupidman has been completed. I like it when I can finish projects. Unlike that stupid fruit fly game for the Atari 2600 I couldn't finish because the scanline kept quivering. I took another stab at it today and couldn't fix it. So will there be a sequel? I don't know. Perhaps if I can think of another thing for Stupidman to do. I'll have to look back at all those old drawings I did as a kid and see if there's any stories that would make good video game fodder. I would like to see this released as well, even though the Hamburgers NES game wasn't very good. I thought it was good, but others didn't agree. So what else have I been up to? Watching YouTube poop. It's really funny. I made one myself. I've decided to start making this a monthly thing. On the turd of each month, I will post a YTP (that's YouTube Poop) video for you all to enjoy. The ants have invaded my bathroom. I have sharp anus pains that come and go, they lied about all the rain we were supposed to get. I am really bored now that Stupidman's completed. I hooked up my NES and tested Stupidman on it. It works great. Perhaps it's time for me to stop making games and start playing the ones I have...

I worked on my game a little. I noticed the walls were a little wonky, the collision detection wasn't quite correct if you bumped into them from the left or right. I tried and tried and finally gave up. But I was bored, so an hour later, I tried again. And after an hour or so of work, I think I got it right. Without Stupidman getting caught in them. As you can see, I also made them look different. I think this looks better than what I had: What do you think? I also made a few more comics and I put together a chair yesterday. It was really hard. I had put the arms on wrong a few different times. Then I actually finished the chair. If this was supposed to be "easy," I think "hard" would be impossible! I went to sleep at noon yesterday and woke up at around 2 a.m.

New comic. Kevin is a zamboni driver. Bertha is his wife. They live in Cincinnati with their dog named Rex. I drew and colored this comic strip because I was bored. I'll probably make more. In case you don't find it funny, it isn't meant to be. It's just, well, odd. And if you do find it funny, good for you. I got this idea because I was looking at a pair of scissors and wondering why they're always in pairs and what is a scissor? I tried really hard to make my handwriting legible. Happy Halloween!

So I worked a little bit on Stupidman this morning. I went to sleep at about 1 p.m. and woke up at around 1 a.m. today. I made some spooky music for walking around the hideout. And I made a map of what I want the hideout layout to look like. One square represents a screen. I made it so no screen repeats itself. It's like a maze Stupidman has to go through. Even though there's already two smaller mazes Stupidman went through (the museum and the grocery store). The F represents where the final battle between Stupidman and Mr. Germ will take place. So hopefully this will be easier to program since I programmed two similar levels. Stupidman is armed with a soap-filled squirt gun, while Mr. Germ throws dirt at Stupidman. Stupidman has to shoot Mr. Germ a lot with the soap. Mr. Germ will grow smaller and smaller (so harder to hit) until Mr. Germ dies. I have the ending all planned out. And no, I won't tell what it is. I want the final battle to be reminiscent of the one in Super Mario Land. And I will make a separate final battle song to play while you battle Mr. Germ.

It was about a year ago when I last worked on this. I forgot a lot of stuff about NES programming. I had to relearn most of it. But I got the intro to level 6 partly done. I thought it would be a shame if I didn't finish this game up since I only had a couple levels left to do, so I decided to pick this back up again. And I don't want to care about how people say if the game is crappy. At least it will be a FINISHED crappy game. So here's a breakdown of the Acts (I wanted to make this sort of like an interactive play of sorts, so I renamed the levels "acts".) going to the museum looking around the museum headed to the grocery store in the grocery store headed to Mr. Germ's hideout in Mr. Germ's hideout the epic battle. I need sleep. So I'm going to sleep now.

I put in the collision detection. It works just fine. I added some support for 2 more banks. If you press 1 on the title screen it goes to bank 1 and pressing 0 will send it to bank 0. But the game goes crazy if you do because those banks aren't in the game yet. When I make banks 0 and 1 and insert them into the game it should work then. I will change it from pressing 1 to pressing the multiply sign (because it looks like an x) and 0 can stay because it looks like an O. Since I put in the collision detection, I had to make it disregard an O getting hit by his own missile. This would happen if he was on the extreme left or right of the screen and if he was up high when he shot it on the extreme side and then came in lower again on the same side, he'd get hit by his own missile and the game would end. So I decided to disregard a hit from O's missile if the O was on the extreme left or right of the screen. And, of course, make it so the X can't go there. I also made it so if an X hits an O, an explosion sound happens, a point would be added, and a new O comes on screen. I also had a bit of trouble making the score disappear when the game ends and you then go into the tic-tac-toe game. The score would still be there. So I had to make some adjustments to that code, and then more to fit in making it go to banks 0 and 1. Fortunately, it all fits in there in (very tightly). What's next to do is work some more on the "main" game to make it better. But I will take a break for Halloween/my birthday and resume work on the third. Really don't want to get angry on my birthday. I had been wondering why my room had been so hot. I discovered the floor vent was open. So I closed it, but it didn't seem to help much. I guess it doesn't take very much to get me hot.

I did. I got rid of the trees in the main game to X Vs. O. The trees should have started small and get bigger. Since they were made of characters, I couldn't. So I took them out. This should make collision detection a lot easier. I'll begin work on that tomorrow. Since the missiles don't touch the character when one begins firing one, all I have to do is detect which missile actually does touch a character. I'd need extra code to figure out which character it hit, but I don't need to since a hit to any character registers as a hit to all characters. So if X's missile (sprite 0) hit the O it'd register a hit. Likewise if the O missile (sprite 1) hit the X it'd register a hit. If X's missile was the one doing the hitting, I'd make it add points and stuff, and if O's missile was the one doing the hitting, I'd make it end the game. So while it SHOULD be fairly easy to do, you just never know with finicky Odyssey 2 consoles. It's a lot like a jigsaw puzzle. If you don't put the pieces together like they should, the picture doesn't come into view. The problem is with programming this way, you don't know where the pieces should go, so it's sort of like a blind person trying to do a jigsaw puzzle. And the Odyssey 2 console is the guy telling you whether you did the puzzle right or not.