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View topic - [Coding competition 2020] The Speccies 2 by Sokurah

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[Coding competition 2020] The Speccies 2 by Sokurah
Post Posted: Fri Mar 27, 2020 5:59 pm
https://www.smspower.org/Homebrew/TheSpeccies2-SMS



Quote
The Speccies 2 is a puzzlegame programmed in Z80 in assembler and has 45 levels of hardcore punishment for the brain.
It's a remake of a Flashgame called “Pathologic“, but it’s a simple and classic game that has seen many forms and names over the years.
I've already coded this for the 16K ZX Spectrum and the Taito L System arcade board, but Sverx talked me into porting it to the SMS.

Gameplay;
You are The Speccie and you have to move around the board and over all the circles to complete each level. Beware not to block your own path because once you’ve touched a square you can’t move across it again. There is no time limit, but you have to be careful and plan your way if you want to succeed.

The game itself is done, but it would really use some decent music and sound effects. What's there is just hastely grabbed from somewhere else and is only meant as being temporary.

Website is here: http://tardis.dk/wordpress/
My e-mail is: retrohead@tardis.dk


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Post Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2020 12:47 pm
Nice and relaxing. While the first few levels are easy enough, there's soon a good deal of head-scratching involved. Very good.

On real hardware I had the problem that the tiles for the collectibles were displayed wrong, but only during the first two or so levels. After that everything was alright.
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2020 6:52 am
The game looks nice! What is the source of the music for the intro?
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2020 8:58 am
hang-on wrote
The game looks nice! What is the source of the music for the intro?

I can't remember. I just downloaded a bunch of games and demos and made a search for something with the right file extension. Then selected something among the search results. Very scientific, lol.

Hopefully someone will like the game enough to help out with some original music and sound effects.
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Post Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2020 9:05 am
A game that surprised me and that I had a lot of fun with!
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Post Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2020 11:10 pm
Yeti Bomar wrote
A game that surprised me and that I had a lot of fun with!

I'm happy you like it. It was fun to make ... if a bit hard to learn the new architecture of the SMS ;)

Next time I code something in Z80 I think I'm going to attempt to write for more than one platform from the get-go, unlike in this case where my three different versions of the game was coded separately.
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Post Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2020 9:13 pm
Welcome Sokurah!

I'm happy you finally released it. It deserved to be enjoyed. :)

The game is very tricky and after playing some 10 levels I realized there is no password (or other mean) to proceed in a next session - which means it's pretty impossible to access the additional levels, unless you're playing on an emulator or you leave your Master System turned on while you sleep/eat/work etc... or you don't do any of these things until you complete the game. So you might want to consider adding SRAM support, which means you can 'save' your result into a non-volatile RAM area so that the next time you start the game you could actually simply continue.

In-game music is missing, but I think some of our fellow forum users versed in music composition could create a couple tunes suitable for this kind of game.

I also think graphics could be upgraded to 'true' SMS art, as the console has not so many limitations compared to ZX Spectrum graphics. You could attach here your art sheets and see if someone is up to the challenge :)

Finally, I also saw the bug Kagesan mentioned. I think it's just an uninitialized memory location. Most emulators start with the whole RAM zeroed, so you won't likely ever see that, but you can try with Emulicious, setting 'Uninitialized Memory' to 'read as random'. You'll see it for sure.

Again, welcome to the SEGA Master System homebrew world.
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Post Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 7:32 pm
Thanks for including the readme... it is true: hardcore punishment for the brain!
Really simple yet really challenging and early on... I really liked this game :)

My suggestion if you were to update this is to have a quit out option as soon as you realize that you have failed before being told you have failed would be good. Also, I know you can Fire1 to retry immediately on fail but when you Game Over back to the level select it would be nice if the game auto selects the last level you failed.rather than always revert to level 01.

I also had similar thought to sverx about persisting your progress in SRAM across sessions. Here is the link that is useful but is in C https://www.smspower.org/forums/16013-DevkitSMSSMSlibMissingRequestingFeatures
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Works great in OpenEmu, less on NTSC SMS v1 with Master Everdrive X7
Post Posted: Sat Feb 24, 2024 7:11 pm
I really like this game, It plays flawlessly in OpenEmu.

However, I own a NTSC Master System v1 along with a Master Everdrive X7 with firmware v1.04, and while the game runs mostly fine, there happens to be some severe graphical corruption appearing on screen (flashing letters and numbers instead of correct sprites). It usually disappears after a little while during play, however getting back to the game's main menu scrambles the graphics even more.

Otherwise, this is a gem!
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