#msxdev compo 2012 #6 - Barebone Bullets

Thanks for your kind words. Just being in the #msxdev chatroom had played a big role in pushing me into learning asm. Because I was joking around "yeah ill maybe join the compo in 10 years when i have learned all this". And then I got a torrent of motivational speak like "Dude its easy, you can make a game in a week" and "Why 10 years? I have been doing asm for 10 years and I have released tons of stuff" .

Not believing it, I just ordered some book from marktplaats to try learn the basics of ASM. Just because I felt having a real physical book may be more inspiring than staring at PDF's. It went slow at first but eventually I was able to make a simple text-based selection menu with random response. About 3 days before the registration deadline I said "hey asm is fun, I will join next years contest" and GuyveR800 just said "You already know enough to make a simple game".

Still not believing it, I decided to start messing around with sprites and about an 15 minutes before the registration deadline I had a hero sprite who can shoot one single bullet and one single moving enemy. So I felt confident enough to make a simpel shmup. Simpel because I thought "how hard can it be, I just need hitdetection, more enemies, more bullets. I will have a fun game for the deadline with a small shot at winning".

Man was I wrong.

Rl got busy and most importantly, having more stuff on screen proved to be somewhat of a challenge. Plus I had to come up with some method for infinite enemies (first try had them overlapping eachother since one would respawn the second I shoot him). Even hitdetection had some problems. Funny that a simple workaround solution for respawning enemies came to my mind when I was taking a shower, 30 minutes before I had to leave the house for new year celebrations. So it was a real rush job to get it done, which turned out ALMOST perfectly.

Nice work syn, especially given the limited time you had to work on it. I hope you got a taste for more MSX coding

The controls are excellent, responsive, and awesome.

Soon you will create another arcade shooter that I play endlessly, like Exerion. Go go go!

There have been some reports of the game not running under various circumstances. The culprit seems to be msxdos1 on later generations msx machines (msx2+ and up).

Because I have no way of testing it on a real msx, there is no guarantee it will work on yours. My assumption is, that it SHOULD work on any msx2 (and higher) when running under MSXDos 2.20

It was developed under BlueMSX, Turbo R machine, with MSXDos 2.20. I know what the problem is but for some odd reason a fix causes some other problems.

My apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Don't be so hard on yourself, syn! Nothing wrong with software being MSX-DOS2 only in 2012/3. Heck, we came very close to making No Pressure turboR only