Lockdown and Loaded

13th March - 6th May 2020

Like many of you, I have been stuck indoors in lockdown. While this lock down has been in place I have been very busy on various C64 game projects. I managed to complete a few over the past 2 or 3 months. Since 15th March 2020. Since I suspect you probably be interested in reading about the game projects, rather than lockdown and all of this. Here is the line up.

Nucleo 448

I teamed up with Leonardo Vettori, to help him improve his game Nucleo 447, by giving it a set of in game enhancements. The game was of course renamed Nucleo 448. This game was originally an entry from last year's Official C64 SEUCK Compo 2019 compo. I helped Leonardo ramp this game up to be more playable and fun. With aid of Martin Piper's framework for SEUCK (SEUCK Redux). Nucleo 448 had a new front end presentation power ups (which allowed the player's bullet to fire faster), in game trance music and also enemy fire AI.

Toilet Paper Stacker

I launched a Lockdown fun compo 2020 on CSDB, in which people could enter the compo and submit either a game, demo or graphics. Music was ruled out of the compo, because there was already a music compo in place. Toilet Paper Stacker was one of these stacker type of games, with a funny theme based on past events. The idea of the game was to stack over sized toilet roll on to a cabinet so that it breaks and kill the virus.

Zzapped in the Butt

Craptastic 2020 was launched earlier on this year. Zzapped in the Butt (Guess where the name ZZapped came from ;)) is a retro style space shoot 'em up. A mother ship is waiting to invade planet Earth, but cannot enter the Earth's atmosphere. So instead, it sends out various aliens to help invade the planet. The ship has to defend its military cities from aliens. The mother ship also decides to attempt to zap your ship in the butt. The game consists of more than 30 levels. Everything crammed into 4K. Expect to see that appear on your C64 in June. :)

Cruiser X-79 (Still in progress)

The vertical scrolling shoot 'em up game project was delayed for some time, but now it has come back in action. New alien movement patterns have been added to the game's code. Not all of the aliens have been put in place, as there are still some more movements in operation. A lot more work has been put into the game project today. Where, I try and restore the alien sprite/sprite collision and do a bit more debugging. Hopefully some time later on this week (or perhaps next week) I should be able to try and restore the game's main game play and get those aliens happy blasting.

All of these games can be found and downloaded from THE NEW DIMENSION for your C64, Ultimate, or theC64

(Except for the latest Cruiser-X 79 preview and Zzapped in the Butt)

Darker than Light

3rd-8th July 2014

Back in January 2014. I worked on a SEUCK game co-op with Alf Yngve called "Dark Force". The challenge was originally to get a first release out for new year's day. It failed and got released later on during that month. February/March saw a re-relase of the same game, with a few extra enhancements. Only major drawback was the SEUCK slow-down syndrome... Eurgh!

Now today on 8th July 2014 before I set off to my work place. I am very pleased to reveal the that the final version of Dark Force. It is Dark Force - Redux. The whole game data was imported into the SEUCK Redux frame work, which Martin Piper supplied on github. I also did a lot of additional hard work programming this production the past 4 days. Including re-programming the new front end. Enhancing the background level settings. Here's the overall result.

- Black/Blue loading screen with loading picture and music (Music from the TND intro on the disk version 'Emotions from Heaven')
- New front end with Hi-Score table, as before, but logo had to be carefully downgraded to 3 colour logo mode, due to lack of memory space for bitmaps.
- Slight tweak of an instrument on the front end tune
- Different background colour schemes for each level
- Intelligent enemy fire (Fires bullets in the direction of where the player was last positioned).
- Most important of them all ... No more SEUCK slow-down syndrome

What originally was meant to have been an experiment with SEUCK, turned into a fun 'game inspired by 'Light Force' by FTL.

If you would like to try out the SEUCK Redux engine, then check out:

Martin's C64 Repository on Github

For the C64 game Dark Force, please visit:

The New Dimension - Download games page

Let the Invasion Commence

Saturday 30th January 2010

I felt like playing around with the Sideways Shoot Em Up Construction Kit as I had this rather funny idea for a a new C64 for diskmag Digital Talk. Well, after 4 days or so, this 'ickle project is finally finished, but will not be released on my web site until a week after Digital Talk #90 has been released with the game and could this game be going to the 2010 Retro Computing event in Oxford? Well, just have to wait and see, despite that I will not be down there.

27th January 2010

Okay, so what was the idea behind this game? Imagine this, you are an alien that wants to take over another planet so that you can make it your own home. Well, Mutilator was born. But why is the name Mutilator used? Well, just to make things pretty funny in the game, you are able to mutilate cows during your travelling across planet Earth, as well as fighting the army forces. What a cruel thing 1 alien vs loads of armed forces :)

I did an earlier unfinished SEUCK game called Kick Ass. Unfortunately Kick Ass did not turn out very well, so I decided to use the background from Kick Ass and import it into Mutilator, as the background looked better compared to an earlier version I did. All I had to do was create some additional designs.

After getting the background finished, I worked on the main sprites for the game. Quite unusual ideas came to my head. I wanted to create a suitable looking alien ship. Well, I drew one. It sort was based on the player in Mastertronic's Erebus, but the sprite in my game was my own work. I also created a few frames to make the player's smooth animation. Looked much cooler. Now it was time for me to draw various enemies and other objects and insert those into the game's map. Then redesign the front end and charset. :)

28th January 2010

Phase 1 complete. Phase 2 was to write the music for the game. Done :) Phase 3 was to import everything into the SEUCK Redux source. No problem, but there was still a lot of work to be done as I did not want this creation to be a typical SEUCK game. I wanted to add some to the game. One of which was extras. One of which was that if you mutilate a cow, you will be given a smart bomb. Also if you do not lose a life and you mutilate more cows (before activating a smart bomb) it gets more powerful. Quite an interesting idea.

29th January 2010

It wasn't until today where I had some more interesting ideas. For a start off the front end. It still looked very SEUCK ish like as all text was using a silver colour bar scroll effect. So I decided to add some more flashing colours to the front end. It looked much better. Now the next bit, was background animation. I programmed some character scrolling routine for the flowing water background. It looked much nicer. I came across another idea. The LEVEL stages. Would be nice to add some effect to the intermission to each level. So I went back to the Sideways SEUCK and created a brand new block and made 7 frames in the character set. Saved everything again, and imported the new work into the redux source. I added a subroutine to animate the laser beam character sets. Looks great. Now the game is finished .... I thought!

Whoops there was still something wrong. The smart bomb effect never worked very well as the wrong sprite was detected to activate it. So I corrected this problem. I thought the game score looked pretty naff, I had to do something with it, so I centred the score panel and expanded both x and y values of it and repositioned all those sprites that formed it. The score panel looked much better. There was still something I wanted to do to it. So I linked the flashing colour routine from the title screen, to the score sprites. It looked much nicer. Now I'm ready to send to Digital Talk!

30th January 2010 (Today)

Ah, no. I should not have sent that version. There was still some tweaking to be done and additional ideas came in place to improve the game. So I updated the in game music, added a game over jingle. I also thought that the game would look cool if when the player is temporarily invulnerable, it will flash one of the colours from the front end. Well, that looked much better. I had to make a tweak in Sideways SEUCK to alter the front end raster bar colour. I also had to tidy up the level settings and delete a few enemies. As I wanted to use the last of the unused enemy sprites. A giant gun boat. I imported all of the SEUCK data into the redux source and finally, a Sideways scrolling SEUCK game that looks commercial :)

Lumme, this is cool. I wanna play this game. Can I get it yet?

The game was produced for Digital Talk #90 disk mag, and will not be released on the TND web site until a week after release of the diskmag. Hopefully some time in February. You should be in for a treat. However, I have donated an earlier (un redux'd) version of this game and the unfinished (and scrapped) Kick Ass game to The SEUCK Vault and should be released hopefully soon. :)