Author Topic: Chip's Challenge  (Read 37220 times)

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Offline simplethinker

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Chip's Challenge
« on: November 20, 2008, 10:50:08 pm »
Since I've never actually released a program despite being active in the calculator community for almost 4 years :-\ I've decided that I should probably do something.  Chip's Challenge is an old tile-mapped puzzle game which follows Chip's quest to get out of some crazy lady's labyrinth.

It'll be a port for the 83+ series in grayscale using xLIB.  The project is in its very early stages but I've already run into a slight problem  :o, so I might as well announce the project anyways.  I don't have much experience with xLIB so please bear with me.

I'm having trouble getting the main sprite to resemble anything when the background tile isn't blank.  I've looked through some tutorials and the closest thing I've found directly addressing this problem is (amazingly) here.
This is a screenshot.  Notice what happens when he enters the water and ice.

(The sprites I'm using right now aren't in grayscale and are just temporary so I can work on to other things.)
How would I mask the sprite so it looks decent when he's in water/on ice?

Right now I'm focusing on modifying the scrolling engine from my map editor to work with xLIB tile-maps and I'll post anything once I make some real progress on this. ;D
« Last Edit: January 13, 2009, 12:11:30 pm by calc84maniac »
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Chip's Challenge: ħ%

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #1 on: November 21, 2008, 10:14:15 am »
This is nice, I am curious how it will turn out with grayscale :)

To mask sprite underwater it might pose a problem. Usually I just draw it anyway but then it might still be visible a bit. You could always have a different sprite be drawn when he's underwater but it might slow things down. How many levels of gray are you planning to use?

Also the screenshot looks a bit distorted, Idk if it's the forums, but you might have specified a specific size and the forums resized it this way x.x

Offline simplethinker

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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #2 on: November 21, 2008, 10:52:27 am »
This is nice, I am curious how it will turn out with grayscale :)
Thanks ;D I really haven't done anything in grayscale so it'll be a while before there's any significant progress towards looking like the real game.

Quote
To mask sprite underwater it might pose a problem. Usually I just draw it anyway but then it might still be visible a bit. You could always have a different sprite be drawn when he's underwater but it might slow things down. How many levels of gray are you planning to use?
I'm planning on just 3 level gray (white, gray, black), but if it's not too slow I might try 4 lvl.  I attached a picture showing Chip on different tiles from the original game.  There's water, fire, ice and force floors (force him to slide).  I can make a different sprite for when he's in water, but for the others it looks like overlaying him on the tile would be best.

Quote
Also the screenshot looks a bit distorted, Idk if it's the forums, but you might have specified a specific size and the forums resized it this way x.x
The screenshot I took was too small so I scaled it to look bigger.

[edit]  I'm thinking about using Celtic III for its string tile-mapper.
[another edit]  Darn, it doesn't look like Celtic III is complete enough :(
« Last Edit: November 21, 2008, 07:08:27 pm by simplethinker »
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Chip's Challenge: ħ%

metagross111

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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #3 on: November 21, 2008, 08:34:22 pm »
it looks pretty good right now.

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #4 on: November 21, 2008, 11:45:27 pm »
i love these tiles, and I would recommend against using Celtic until the entire game is finished because developpement was halted for an undetermined amount of time and it still has some issues. I myself got display glitches with Super Mario Smash Dance, Metroid II: Evolution/Expansion, Bowling and Project Omega Race Ngine

Offline calc84maniac

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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #5 on: November 22, 2008, 01:19:27 am »
I was going to make Chip's Challenge in 8-level grayscale (in ASM of course) for the last Cemetech contest, but all the progress I made on that was the actual grayscale engine. :P Good luck on yours, though!
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Offline simplethinker

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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #6 on: November 22, 2008, 12:36:49 pm »
Thanks ;D

i love these tiles, and I would recommend against using Celtic until the entire game is finished because developpement was halted for an undetermined amount of time and it still has some issues. I myself got display glitches with Super Mario Smash Dance, Metroid II: Evolution/Expansion, Bowling and Project Omega Race Ngine
Yeah, after I posted that I went to the progress post on UTI.  I downloaded the latest version and it was a bit buggy.
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Chip's Challenge: ħ%

Offline Speler

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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #7 on: November 23, 2008, 10:13:47 am »
I love this game :D.

Offline simplethinker

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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #8 on: November 23, 2008, 01:30:13 pm »
Would anyone be interested in creating the sprites/tiles for this?  My attempts so far have been a bit frightening :o  The sprites should be 8x8.  I'm planning on 3 layer grayscale, but if it looks like grayscale isn't necessary for a reasonable amount of detail I might consider just black and white.
I've attached a chart with the black & white sprites from the original game, but since they're 32x32 anything resembling them in 8x8 would be fine.  For the buttons (5th row from the top) the reasons for the "+", "T" and little arrow are to distinguish between what would be colors, so any other way to distinguish them would work.
Any help would be appreciated ;D

[edit] Okay, I've got doors+keys, picking up chips, and the winning conditions done so far.  Next up are the movable blocks, water, and fire.  Once I figure out what to do for the timer I'll organize the HUD.  Here's the first level (still black & white sprites):

[another edit] Wow, the movable blocks were way easier than I thought.  Got that done...
« Last Edit: November 23, 2008, 10:18:38 pm by simplethinker »
"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." -- Professor Robert Silensky



Chip's Challenge: ħ%

Offline TIfanx1999

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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #9 on: November 24, 2008, 12:49:10 am »
Perhaps you should just stick with black and white, it looks fine that way, and grayscale will slow it down. :) I'll see if i can fiddle with some of the sprites.

metagross111

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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #10 on: November 24, 2008, 07:28:09 am »
ill have a go at those sprites as well.

Offline tifreak

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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #11 on: November 25, 2008, 10:16:59 am »
I noticed you said in the pokemon battle thread that the data for each level is 9kb. Is that correct? How are you storing the data? If it is just matrices, you could utilize Celtic2 to simply keep the data in Archive, and read the information right from there. Might be something to help you out. :)
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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #12 on: November 25, 2008, 01:19:42 pm »
the maps must be friggin huge if it's 9 KB O.O. DO you mean 9 KB for the programs where the matrice is stored with or 9 KB when in matrix form?

Offline simplethinker

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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #13 on: November 25, 2008, 01:58:43 pm »
Whoops, I meant 9kb for the matrices.  I forgot that the size of the command storing it's less than the size of the matrix (I was freaking out when I first looked at the size of a matrix :o).  This will make things a bit easier (I might even be able to fit 2 lvl's worth of data into one program), thanks for catching that!
The maps are at most 32x32 (at least up so far as I've played).  The file size for using one program per level's data: with a 6 byte name (prgmZLVLFF), a 32x32 matrix with at most 2 digits per element, initial chip count 3 digits, and starting location 5 bytes for a total of 3136 bytes.  I won't know how the enemy data will impact this until I figure out how I'll be managing that part  (some behavior is level-specific and some is generic).  It looks like I could cut another 1kb out if I store the map as a string and then convert it into a matrix at initialization, but that would significantly increase level initialization time.
I'll probably be using Celtic II for reading level data.
« Last Edit: November 25, 2008, 02:03:05 pm by simplethinker »
"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." -- Professor Robert Silensky



Chip's Challenge: ħ%

metagross111

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Re: Chip's Challenge
« Reply #14 on: November 25, 2008, 02:37:47 pm »
so, what does celtic2 do?