Saturday 16th November 2002

Found several silly bugs, from people and boxes not appearing to the hook not going behind things. All fixed now, but just when I thought I'd finished again, I found 2 more bugs... Going to have to test them thoroughly, so I've delayed the release until Wednesday. Fingers crossed!

Friday 15th November 2002

Latest changes are:
Finished off the hiscores (including loading and saving of 'em)
Got compression working, so the final game weighs in at less than 200kb
Added some unlockable "extras" :) Fixed the palette for hardware - it looks a tad washed out in emulators, but looks far brighter on the real thing.

Excellently, that's everything finished! I'm going to test it a fair bit on hardware to find any silly litle bugs/niggles and to tweak the gameplay. Keep an eye on a release in the next few days!

Friday 1st November 2002

No updates for a while, but I've made a load of progress. The hi score table, options and start screen are all done (well, apart from some sprucing up). Apart from the dreaded sound fx, there are no major new things that I want to add. So from now on it's just some thorough testing to make sure I haven't missed anything important.

Wednesday 16th October 2002

The picking up animation is totally fixed and works a treat. Added the random planes that fly about when you go between islands. Everything is finished in game now, I just have to put it all together with some nifty options, a title screen, hi score table and some sound effects (ulp! sound effects are impossible!)

Thursday 10th October 2002

Added the cyclone and the wind indicator thingy. The cyclone is quite effective, so much so that I have to turn it off for debugging or I crash all the time :) Next I'm going to sort out the pick-up animation, because it's a bit broken at the moment.

Sunday 29th September 2002

Finally fixed the last irritating bug in the main graphics stuff (he said, tempting fate).

Wednesday 18th September 2002

Finished adding the people. Added the random box element, the scoring and the people animation. Most of the stats displays are in place. Here is another screen shot and the original game to compare:

So the remake is a bit like "Cyclone - wide screen version".

Tuesday 10th September 2002

Added the hook, fixed the explosions and you can now collect the people and boxes that are kicking about. Played around with the handling a bit, it runs too fast in VBA, but should be OK on hardware. Have to add the south facing people stuff yet. I've probably added some other things that I've forgotten about too, but it's progressing along nicely.

Monday 2nd September 2002

Ooof. I've forgotten everything about GBA games while on holiday.

Rewritten the graphic loading routines and they are much easier to deal with now. Started adding the gauges for speed, fuel, height, etc. The graphics are in place, "just" have to add the logic behind them (height and speed done.) The people adding routines continue, it is slightly easier now with the new loading stuff for graphics. Also: I broke the explosions. Arse.

Tuesday 30th July 2002

The world map's in place and makes navigating a lot easier. Started adding the people, though this looks like it'll be a pain to do.

Thursday 25th July 2002

Collisions added and it works pretty well. Implemented a better location getting routine, so that the speed of the scrolling doesn't depend so much on which island you are hovering over (got rid of the loop over all islands mentioned above, in favour of a binary search) Fixed a scroll glitch when flying downwards. Added the waves to the sea and fixed a couple of scroll bugs (to do with wrapping and north-south flipping.) Finally, added the landing stuff, complete with better speed handling, and improved the "feel" of flying the copter. Started designing the collection part of the game.

Tuesday 16 July 2002

The people and box extractor has been added to the map editor, as has the ability for me to edit box locations - this will probably be it for the map stuff now, it seems pretty much finished.

I sorted the scrolling engine so it scrolls diagonally properly, and it goes a bit faster now too. Finally fixed the timing by tying everything to the VSync, so it should run at the same speed in emus and on hardware now. Added the blades. Added the handling, so now it feels more like the original with the copter having a touch of inertia. Added an explosion graphical effect, triggered by pressing B at the moment, as I haven't added collision detection yet.

Wednesday 10 July 2002

Coordinates sorted. Also changed the order of some stuff so that the shadow stops flickering as it did before.

Tuesday 9 July 2002

Added the south facing map generating stuff to the map maker. Now it's possible to flip the view to the south one! Bugs galore, mostly as the coordinates aren't handled properly, but it is getting there.

Monday 8 July 2002

Found an irritating bug that only showed itself on hardware. It was to do with sprite locations, layers and priorities. I won't bore you with the details, but it looks like no emulators draw the sprites with the correct front-to-back ordering when there are overlapping sprites. Anyway, sorted now and the "game" as it is, is looking very promising...

Thursday 4 July 2002

Oh my! After finishing off my map creator and ironing out the couple of bugs it had, I introduced the above code for calculating which island to show, plus I made a couple of changes from the old scrolling demo I had to make use of the new data format the map creator churns out and... it worked flawlessly! :-O

Now it's possible to fly around the whole set of islands, and they are all in their correct locations with no mapping errors. It has taken a fraction of the time it would have done if I'd drawn the maps by hand from scratch too. Excellent!