Crystals of Xaz WIP- current status

I started out playing around with the Fenix source code for a GP2X/32x game called Istappen (source posted at http://fenixonfire.gp32x.de/html/sources.html), testing some music, sound, and graphics loading code as a way to test the limits of Fenix on Dreamcast, and ended up adding more and more features to the code. It's now to the point where it's become a full-fledged, albeit unfinished, game of its own. The original game has the player dodging icicles and grabbing packages as they fall. One hit and you're dead; game over. I've added music, sounds, new background and mode7 graphics, other new graphics (all placeholders at the moment), a player energy routine, powerups (energy and lasers only at the moment), a routine to count chains, and some other code cleanups. It's become quite a fun and addicting game in its own right so far, but I've got a lot to add and a lot of work to do to bring it up to my own high standards for a completely fun game. Once it's finished, I'll be releasing it with full source code so that others may learn from my experience. Here's a screenshot of the current WIP:

http://atari.vg-network.com/coxwip.jpg

For those interested in writing your own games using Fenix for Dreamcast, an easy-to-learn procedural scripting language similar to Java, visit my Fenix for Dreamcast Technical Information site at http://atari.vg-network.com

Good job!

it looks not bad. You are doing a great job, man :)

Crystal of Xaz is a Fenix for Dreamcast game. See original post of this thread for more information.

I've learned how to use structs! I've added the struct for level parameters and plugged them into the game processes, so now the game has a number of different levels added to it, which change based on a quota system. In other words, catch a certain amount of crystals per level, and the level changes, along with the level parameters. There is still a lot of tweaking to do, but my master plan for the game is coming along smoothly and steadily. Here's a current screenshot (keep in mind that the current graphics and display are just placeholders until the new graphics are finished):

http://atari.vg-network.com/xazwip.jpg

I played around with some cd audio code and burning a selfboot cd with CDRECORD so I could change the songs that play during the levels, but so far my experiments have failed. Unfortunately, Fenix for DC has some memory limitations that only allow one to load up to 3 megs of song data, give or take a few kbytes, and I've attempted to get around this by using CD-DA, but due to either a bug in DC Fenix with the CD audio functions, or simply my own problems with setting up the CD to play audio, I have been unable to get the audio to play. So thus far, I only have one song that is able to be loaded and played using the load_song and play_song functions. I also tried to unload the current song and load a different one to play, but this crashes the game. I'll continue to experiment and see if I can come up with some sort of solution to this problem.

There's still a lot of work to do. I need to add another powerup, level transition screens, tweak the level parameters for steady difficulty ramping, add the new graphics and fix the display (there will be more than one enemy, trust me!), and a few more surprises :) Stay tuned!