Thanks Josh! Yeh Im happy with the Commodore64 choice, its just a shame that I dont own one anymore. Would be great to do all the dev on the actual computer rather than in an emulator.
An update for the past 3 days, along with unfortunetly being pretty sick Ive managed to:
- Locate an online version of the C64 manual, which has been a very interesting read (how much I wish I had that manual 25 years ago, I could have been learning how to code and make games before I was 10, rather than half way through highschool!)
- See the Todd Douglas Miller Apollo 11 documentary at the cinema which Id highly recommend (trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Co8Z8BQgWc)
- Work out a general idea of what the game/game-loop will be. Its ambitious but Im interested in seeing how far I can get with it in the 2 months of this jam! (more on the actual game in later posts when I get further along)
- Learn some more code, like how to change the game background when the game starts (black background for space, and grey border now for a more lunar feel), check keyboard inputs, how to clear/rewrite text to the screen which is handy for debugging variables and also finally how to move sprites around.
Heres the game as of day 4, the lander has a gravity acceleration applied to it every frame and you can move left and right currrently. The bottom of the screen is acting as the 'lunar surface' for now - so I have a very very rudimentary collision detection in place along with a landing message. So thats basically a game loop running! Its not much of a game atm though of course! But Im happy to have some level of interactivity going on now.
Next Id like to continue working on the lander controls and get the sideways movement working as an acceleration, along with an upwards boost and then maybe some visual puffs from the thrusters whenever youre boosting around.
From readings Ive also realized that BASIC is pretty slow for making games, I might need to switch to assembly programming at some point, which I figured Id be doing regardless. But i'll see how far I can get with just BASIC for now.
The code has gone from 21 lines to 70 lines - from 800 bytes to 1537 bytes (1.537kb)