Many years ago I made a game called Thunderbirds, which was based on the Amiga game of the same name, which was of course based on the 1960's TV series (if you haven't seen the original TV series, you're missing out - no matter how campy the puppets & dialogue are, it's amazing!)

Early last year I started reprogramming Thunderbirds from scratch, but I never finished it. I've decided to pick up where I left off and see how it goes. This isn't a sequel to the last version, but is essentially the same game redone, programmed much better. I'm doing this mainly for 2 reasons:

- The previous version was all hardcoded in terms of the existing mission, so that it was near on impossible for me to expand on the game and include the remaining three missions.

- The gameplay & controls were very clunky.

Version 2.0.0 will still be for the TI-83 / 83+ / 84+ series of calculators. Coding is probably around 50% completed at a guess. Some of the improvements are:

- Graphics have been touched up, in particular I'm no longer "borrowing" the earth tiles from Sqrxz, I've drawn new ones that look more like the original Amiga game.

- Missions (or levels) and all their applicable code & data are stored in external files, so that if I decide to go back and add any of the remaining three missions later on, it's fairly straight forward.

- Controls have been adjusted and simplified.

- Gameplay is no longer so stop/start all the time when text hints come up.

- Items sitting about the place now flash so that they're easier to identify, instead of just blending in with the background.

I'll post updates as I get more done and probably some screenshots, here and also on http://www.jvti.org.

Based on the screenshots you have at ticalc, and the screenshots I found of the Amiga game on Google, this looks pretty neat. I'm excited to se emore

Is the original version available anywhere for us to play with, or were you so disappointed with it that you elected not to publish it? Sounds like fun, though, and I'm glad to hear that you're already so far along with progress. I don't see it anywhere in your description, and I'm afraid I've never seen the original Amiga game, so I must ask what genre of game this is.

I like the screenshot of the title, hopefully one of some game play will be available soon

The previous version 1.2 is available here: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/134/13446.html.

Yeah I was surprised when I went back to the code to see how much I'd already gotten done, it's mainly just the mission-specific mechanics that I need to address now. I guess you could describe the genre as "platform puzzle" or "platform rpg".

I'll post a screenshot in the next few days showing the current state of the game

Gerry Anderson, the creator of thunderbirds, died recently. Will this give you any motivation?

I was very sad to hear of Gerry's passing.. I posted a short note about it yesterday on my site jvti.org. I spent years of my childhood entertained by the Thunderbirds TV series, thanks to Gerry.

Below is a short screenshot showing what the re-programmed version of the game is looking like. As I noted on my site:

"For those who have played previous versions of the game from back in 2000, you will notice a few things, such as the tileset graphics being improved (now looking much more like the Amiga original), some minor interface changes, and things such as status bar text no longer halting gameplay, and items on the ground now flash so that they're easier to identify / find."

This looks pretty neat--have you thought at all about greyscale? I think that would make it a little easier to tell what's going on, and let you have more detailed graphics.

Well that is certainly an interesting screenshot. Hope there will be more soon.

I hadn't really considered grayscale.. I would say at this stage it will stay as monochrome, however I've put grayscale on my suggestions list

Quick update: I finally got back into doing some work on this on the weekend. Spent a few hours implementing a couple more of the components of the first mission.

Considering I started v2 back in March 2011, based on my current rate of progress, I should be finished by late 2015

But in all seriousness, hopefully I can get it finished in the next couple of months!

After some prodding from Dudeman313 & chickendude, I've recently started looking over this project again. It's been sitting on my "to-do" list for quite some time, and I figure it's due for some progress.

My intention is to almost start again, but I will be able to re-use parts of the current "v2.0.0" that I had started. The goal of this is to make the TI-83+/84+ version into a flash application (currently it's a program with external files) and hopefully with grayscale graphics, as well as creating a TI-84+CE version in colour that essentially runs off the same code base. Also ideally I want to include all 4 missions in the game, instead of just the single mission that v1.x included.

At the same time, I want to continue progress on AB5 as well, so I'll be doing my best to juggle these!

Good luck juggling the two projects, and I'm excited to hear that you'll be picking this one up again. Is it fair to assume that you can reuse the monochrome-to-color wrapper that you're using for Alien Breed with this project as well to save you some work? Four missions sounds time-consuming; do you have any tools to help you automate it?

I haven't seen Thunderbirds since middle school. I forget which channel it was on in the US. It's not on Netflix or Amazon instant video; I'd totally watch it again if it was.

I intend to go all out with this one in terms of the TI-84+CE, with a full 256 colour sprite set, most likely using 16x16 sprites. Regarding the four missions, there will be a lot of manual coding to cover all the required mechanics - it won't be a small job. But it will be a good challenge

Hopefully it joins Netflix soon! I'm lucky I have the full DVD set

I'm really looking forward to this, it's been probably fifteen years since i played the original ion game, i was really impressed by it at the time. Having all four missions would be great. I can't wait to see some of the color screenshots, either!

Haha that's cool to hear! I really rushed the original game out back in the day, and there were some mechanics in the later missions that at the time I didn't have the confidence to try to tackle, which is why I never got around to missions 2, 3 & 4.

The TI-84+CE version should look very similar to the Amiga original. I'm currently working out how I want to handle cross-compatibility between the CE and non-CE versions, with different screen resolutions. In the original game, each room is 20 columns x 6 rows (using 16x16 tiles) - this is great for the CE. I can either use small 4x4 (grayscale) tiles on the non-CE version to fit each room on the lower res LCD, or I can implement some side-scrolling for each room (using 8x8 tile size), or I can reduce the room size on the non-CE to something like 12x5. Too many choices!!

Here's the beginning of the TI-84+CE version:

Platforms and a moving guy, an excellent start! Is him flashing green when he walks to the left a feature, a bug, or an emulator quirk? This is still ASM rather than C, correct? I assume you made your own sprite routines? 8-bit or 16-bit?

It's not much, but I'm going to be away for a few days so I thought I'd post a quick update The green flashing I think is a GIF glitch, it doesn't do that in real time on CEmu or on a calculator. It's all in 8-bit colour with my own routines, which are still yet to be optimised. The player moves 4 pixels per frame.