Surprised for once!

I had some time on my hands and decided to start getting into this project.. As per usual you spend about 10% of the time on the majority of the code and 90% of the time finding THIS ONE TINY BUG!

In my case it was a errant space in an equate - meh!

Of course it was compounded by the code I had written deciding to write itself into devpac's memory space... so I ended up with bunches of syntax errors in the editor every time I tried to debug.... spend 10 mins fixing errors, 10 mins bughunting, crash, reboot, repeat... argh! well on the upside am using WinUAE (still no room for the Ami.. maybe I'll get a new desk this week).

Already I've discovered about 3 things that make me wonder how EVA even manages to compile without crashing - I'm glad I took this lesser project to sort things out - already I'm working up new code solutions to problems and trying very hard not to overcomplicate them.

I'm not posting a pic at this point, as it would be embarrassing really - you can be proud of something on a technical level but showing it to the world in so rough a state is inviting 'that sucks'. But here's a breakdown of what I've got going so far:

-Clean entry and exit.
-Mock scoreboard (blank rectangle really) as a placeholder on top of the screen. This area will be static and separate from the playfield.
- Memory allocation for the playfield (so for blank and no code)
- A 1 sprite parallax starfield that I'm actually pretty proud of - no biggy but I figure if sprite 7 is turned off (and I will be using sprites in this game - probably for bombs)
The nifty (to me) thing was getting it to work at a single pixel speed. Most sprite starfields work at 2x speed because bit 0 for horizontal control is tucked away in another register. 2x would be a bit too fast for scramble as the background stars would be running faster than the foreground (which I see running at 1 or 2 pixels per update)
it runs in 2 levels (but could with ease be expanded - but I won't - well not now). Originally it was going to be a 'plain jane' one layer, but curiosity got the better of me...

Likewise I'm getting ideas about gameplay and graphics.. I REALLY want to keep close to the original (overcomplications again) till I get a beta version finished and out to play (yay! a FINISHED game! won't that be cool?)
But more about that next week!

Cheer!