Coding update: Finished rearranging the tilemap. Now it uses full-byte tiles, which will let me add more objects later on (which also means levels will now be stored about twice as large as before, unfortunately ).

Something I'm probably going to add later on is allowing levels to define what tiles look like. That way I can keep it down to 64 unique tiles, some of which get reused for different objects between levels (such as for a tree in stage 1 and a pipe in stage 4).

EDIT: And spawning enemies! I nearly forgot how fun it is to code

EDIT2: And how frustrating. I add one short snippet of code and it messes up half the code from 3 separate subroutines

Maybe I should start optimizing after the coding's done.

I finally, finally received my TI-Graphlink cable! So here's the update, with an actual screenshot. A more detailed breakdown of how things are progressing is on http://contra.clrhome.co.cc/.

First of all, I'm really sorry this took so long. The first demo was supposed to be in March, and that's passed. And sorry to disappoint you again, but there's still no demo here. The reason is that I don't feel like I've done enough for people to actually want to try out.

I'll admit it, progress has been terribly slow. I've been busy recently, and all the free time I had was almost devoted almost entirely to building my site (and wasting time playing Tetris, for some reason). I got very little work done on my calculator projects, and of the work I did do, a lot was on a little project in Mimas that I've now pushed back. There were also a few other little projects that I tried making, but I gave up on all of them. And so I've decided that my top priority right now (in terms of calculator projects) will be Contra.

And for Contra, there isn't much to show in the screenshot, mainly because of the number of times I've had to restart and rewrite. The entire program's been rewritten at least four times, and most of the individual pieces have been rewritten a lot more than that. I guess I probably should have put off optimizing until after I finished the actual program, because my code's now nearly illegible and it takes time for me to pick up this project again.

tl,dr: A screenshot. Sorry for the underwhelmingness.

Thanks

I'm starting to run out of room though. 5953 bytes (compiled) and counting.

EDIT: Water (sort of) works!

EDIT2: Edited first post.

EDIT3: Update lost on the previous page: http://ourl.ca/7770/194366

wow, lots of progress since last time!  This is going to me one of my all-time eagerly awaited games.  

Looks a bit flickery but overall very awesome! Will you have trouble seeing the character over the tiles?

Thanks. And a little update: health/lives works. Still a long way to go until even Level 1 runs the way it's supposed to, but I'll have a little demo on Monday.

Not much, but as promised:

Contra Pre-Alpha Demo v0.01 (4-11-11)



Download

tried it already. look great except for one thing: can the turret thingies die?