That font is very cool though .

Thanks!


The only reason "Exit" is in title case is because the "x", "i", and "t" chars were already implemented, so I just had to add an "E". (The same thing happened with "PLAY", I don't have to add any chars if it's uppercase).

Would you guys prefer that the options all uppercase (like "PLAY") or title case (like "Exit")? It's not too hard to change, now that I have my scripts.

Get ready for a high quality post.

UPPERCASE!

If I didn't know any better, I would say more people are interested in the font and not the program

Anyways, the font looks amazing and I am looking forward to playing this game!

P.S: I vote titlecase

I did all kinds of awesome things today!

I eliminated all kinds of bugs that were present. This took a long time, as most of these bugs seemed to be caused by something that wasn't actually causing them. (i.e. all of the evidence pointed to my RNG routine modifying some internal variables, but it was actually because I deleted a few extra lines of code while trying to remove a comment).

I decided to make the menu options titlecase, only because I'm lazy and making them all uppercase would make me add 3 chars instead of 1

I also added the code to draw in the multiplier. It pads the score to a length of 4, but I'm working on modifying my score-drawing routine so it only pads it to 2.

I also made the menu options functional! Before, both options would lead to "playing".

Here's a gif showing all of the changes I made today!


We are really close to release! I hope to have this project done before school starts for me on the 30th.

You should make the snails crawl in rather than flashing like that. Keep up the good work!

Thanks!

About the crawling, would the best method to do this be to shift that part of the screen up by a pixel, or should I redraw the screen with the snails up a pixel? I'm leaning towards the former because my drawing routine isn't too efficient, it would just be a lot of overhead. I'm not sure, I might end up just calculating timings.

Yeah smooth movement would be cool, but yes there are probably a few ways to do it in your case.

I'd suggest trying the way you are thinking first to see if it has acceptable results. Overall it seems like that method would be suitable.

Here's what it looks like if I use that method: (this is very slow, but the speed is easily adjustable)



I've decided that the snails at the top are going to do a little attack animation (I'll shift them up quickly, then shift them back down, to make it look like they are biting or whatever), then I'll make them fly out to the left.

The new snails coming in from the bottom will quickly fly in from the bottom in their own animation. I can't gradually make them slide in without lots of changes to my code, because I calculate the new snail row after the shifting is done.

I redid my timer code. Before I had one timer, but now I have two timers. The first one is the time between the shifting up of the snails. When it completes, I decrement the second timer, which is the time between new snail rows and eventually the animations.

I might try to stagger the movement of the snails within each row so it looks more realistic, but that's a lot of work.

Thank you so much Mateo, this suggestion made this game look a lot better!

Today (well, yesterday as I am posting this), I worked on the above animations!

I'm no longer afraid of doing more complex graphics, because I actually can work through most of the problems I encounter which is super awesome. There are still problems that evade me, though, but I can usually get around them with a bit of refactoring and duck tape.

I'm not going to post the animation just yet (it's very much not done and extremely buggy), but it looks awesome even if it is sped up a good 700 times (not CEmu's fault) for reasons I can't discern... But if you step through the code while looking on the memory viewer, it's pretty nice.

I've decided that I'm going to optimize the program for size, considering that a significant portion of my code is dedicated to slowing the darn thing down so it's even visible. I'm down to 1295 bytes (code only, no sprites or font) right now, but there are numerous unnecessary jumps and several sections of repeated code.

So I unfortunately did not have time to work on this project for quite some time (family/irl stuff), but I've made good use of the time I had today!

I fixed the timing stuff and added the part of the animation that makes the snails fly out! Here, check it out:


half-way through the gif I'm like "this is never going to end x.x"

The gif shows off almost all of the features added so far, including the multiplier and how it gets reset if you run into anything. The game looks pretty sweet right now! I want to work on optimizations now, my code is getting quite large. My code is 1378 bytes from these additions, and after some optimizations I made during the writing of this post I got it down 20 bytes. I'm sure that with some more effort I could lop off more bytes.

This is really the first time I've been able to play the game, and it's a ton of fun. (I'm not saying this because I wrote it, either. I genuinely found it enjoyable) It's fast paced, but not too fast (for a while at least).

I might try to get the up and down animations more visible. I don't like how fast they are.

There's also a bit of a glitch in the beginning where it plays the animation sequence (you can't see it, but it's running the code) before it draws the snails, causing a uncomfortable wait. This is fixable and shouldn't take too long.

For attack of the snails... those snails seem to be moving fast

Anyways, this game looks really cool and am looking forward to the initial release!

I lower my timings when I'm recording a gif because I figure peoples' attention spans are probably not this long.

I can slow down the game to 70% of this, but even that's a bit fast for snails. There are 4219761 cycles (the figure came from CEmu) between each time I shift the snails up a pixel. Because the CE runs at 48mHz, it takes about .09 seconds (rounded) for the snail to move up a pixel.

According to a quick search, the largest snail known is the


Each snail sprite in AotS is 15 pixels tall, meaning that each pixel is about 2 inches (rounded). I obviously don't care about scale too much, because that means our dear friend Robert is 37*2 = 74 inches (188-ish cm)... Actually, Robert is surprisingly to-scale (ignoring individual body part proportions), standing at 6'2", a perfectly reasonable height for an adult male!

2 inches / .09 seconds = (about) 2.25 inches per second = (about) 0.125 miles per hour (.2 kph)

Another quick search told me that the Giant African snail's top speed is about .002 miles per hour.

Maybe if our snails had jetpacks.

If the prgm is good, then people will bother to look, so make it good


lol

Also, put a border around the health bar, so people know how much health they have, and it just looks better...

That's a fantastic idea, I'll implement that!

Here, have a public beta. You can download the current program from here!

Be sure to back you calc up (emulator highly recommended). There shouldn't be any major bugs, but my debugging/testing is in no way complete. also don't reverse-engineer my code from the decompiled binary unless you want a major headache, just wait for the source

You can find a features list somewhere above, I'm too lazy to write down everything I've done.

I'm not releasing my source just yet, I want to have the time to optimize by myself before all of my code is compressed down into some unimaginably tiny space.

I uploaded AotS to the archives queue, it's currently waiting to be accepted!

In the meantime, you can check out the source on GitHub!

Attack of the Snails was accepted into the archives!

Check it out!

The source code is available on GitHub for your enjoyment (and pain), so go check that out if you have the time and endurance.