HailStorm CE

Download HailStorm from the Cemetech archives!

Overview
HailStorm CE is a game for the TI-84 Plus CE/TI-83 Premium CE calculators in which you are in a spaceship, and must make it as far as you can through an asteroid field. You have the option to shoot these asteroids with your ship's cannons, or activate your shield if all else fails. Featuring smooth gameplay, nice graphics for the ships, asteroids, and the background, and 5 different ships to choose from, it should be a fun program to play in math class or anywhere.

Latest Screenshot


Progress/upcoming features
Add more spaceships 100%
Finish the settings and statistics menus 100%
Add a line that appears as you beat your high score 100%
Make the end screen look better 100%
General bug fixes and optimizations 100%
About Screen 100%
Ship Unlock System 100%
Add a logo on the main screen 100%
Improve the UI 100%
Powerups 100%
Status 2.0.1 has been released, the final update for HailStorm.

Planned Release Date
I want to finish this game completely within a month's time, at which point it will be released into the Cemetech archives. Before that, I may run a beta test as well. EDIT: successfully met this release date, with a week or so to spare.

Spaceship Design
If you are interested in designing some spaceships for HailStorm CE, I am happy to consider your submissions for inclusion into the game. If you submit a spaceship for the game, I will give you a place in the ingame and written credits. Spaceships should be 30 x 30 pixels, with white as the transparent color. They should be a top-down view.

Ooh, maybe I can give the graphics a try!

How many different kinds of asteroids do you want?

Great, thanks. Around 3 different types would be ideal (due to their large size), but I could put in slightly more than that if you or others have a lot of designs.

Use RLET, 4bpp, or 2bpp sprites, that'll solve the size constraint issue

Looks cool and runs really well!

The action quickly gets pretty hectic lol.

I really like the idea of using RLET sprites, but I have never been successful in getting them to work. Do I define one like this?

Code:

I’m not sure if I can still use the MallocSprite routine or something else as with regular sprites either. If someone could fill me in that would be good (if not, I’m pretty comfortable with using regular sprites).

EDIT: Thanks to everyone for the interest in this project as well.

Uhh no. RLET sprites are not a fixed size to their dimmensions.
I'm not sure what the data type's like, but try using "gfx_rlet_sprite_t" and the "gfx_rlet*" functions.
Try skimming through "graphx.h" and search for "rlet"

I whipped together a concept idea for the spaceship using the (powerful) MS Paint.

Both look a little fuzzy simply due to scaling them up for this post. Feel free to click on either image and download if you decide to use one of them.

Nice, those look really good. The one on the left will be included in the game, and you’ll get a place in the credits. I use MS Paint too, and it can be a powerful tool if you know how to use it (which I don’t really).

Progress:
-improved the main GUI
-made an (untested) generic menu function that will cut down on size and that I’ll be able to use for other programs later on
-improved the star field background so it scrolls more smoothly
-took out the framerate independent movement, since I feel like the speed it was taking away from the program didn’t justify what it did. It also made the gameplay jump at points, and made the program size bigger. With it removed, the game now hits a maximum speed of around 56 FPS, and only drops to 35 or so with 20 asteroids on the screen.

Next, I’m going to work on the gameplay more to get it to a somewhat completed state, then the main and pause menus.

EDIT- Thanks for the help beck, I’ll take a look at the graphx source when I get the chance.

It's been a while since I posted on this, but I have been working on it nonetheless and have a lot of new updates to share. Here's what's new:
[added]: main menu
[added]: the ability to fire bullets
[added]: the ability to activate a shield
[added]: a real sprite for the ship (designed by matkeller)
[improved]: the death screen
[improved]: control scheme, you now must use the left and right arrows to turn, and if you don't press anything, the ship will center itself
[improved]: some performance improvements

Screenshot:


Please post feedback or suggestions if you have any. Also, if you want to design some art for the game, I will accept submissions until I release the game. There are more details in the first post about designing sprites for the game.

Wow! The movement is really cool and the gameplay looks very polished thus far.

Always had a soft spot for starfields too.

Very nice indeed. The movement looks smooth, framerate stable A lot of improvement and a space shooter

Added some more spaceships and got to work on the menu (about, stats, etc. are consolidated into one big menu instead of small ones as I have done in previous submissions):

I'm also going to make it so that each ship fires two shots with each press of 2nd instead of just one (one from each side of the ship) as all of my ships seem to have two guns, one on each side.

Update for today:
[added] a new ship
[improved] there are sprites for the asteroids now
[didn't break] the FPS that much with the new sprites

Screenshot (showing the new ship and the new asteroid sprites):

The last spaceship sceenshot reminds a chess piece pawn with two hands The others look nice.

Asteroids apears to be awsome

Edit:


Nice Job

Some new stuff:
[added] the beginnings of the settings page
[added] the statistics page, and made it correspond to stuff you do ingame (shooting asteroids, getting highscores, etc.)
[added] an option in the settings page that will let you change your shield and bullet colors to whatever you want
[improved] more things are saved in the appvar, such as your last selected ship, all your statistics, your custom colors, etc.
[improved] the ship selection screen, it will now take out arrows if you're at the start or end of the list
[improved] all asteroid sprites are now prescaled before the game runs, which increases the FPS dramatically
[fixed] you can now longer scroll past the start or the end of the available ships in the ship selection screen
[fixed?] a very large bug that breaks the game, may need some people to confirm this later because it's difficult to reproduce

Screenshot of the improved menu and the custom colors for the shield and bullets:

It is getting better and better , very smooth. Is this the Release Candidate ?

Not yet, there's still a lot of things to do before this can be released. I just edited the first post to show a timeline of planned and upcoming features, which will be updated as I add these features. When everything gets to 100%, the program will be released.

Thank you for the update

Added some new ships:

Let me know what you think of them, or if you have any ships you'd like added that I can make. I have made a number of other updates and improvements as well, which will be announced once I make some more progress (probably after I get a start on the about screen and the ship unlock system).