The new choon that appeared last night, Generous Justice, is the music for Franken-Hopper.



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I've just noticed a really odd bug in my site, via the method of visiting another site!

Over at Nintendo Max they've listed Flappadiddle as being from October 2017.
"October 2017? It definitely isn't from then.. Where on earth have they got THAT date from?"
.. I checked my own site, and...

Oh..

The dates on the downloads in the Game Archive Downloads have been wrong since the site rewrite!!!

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I tried to tackle the online-leaderboard component of my 3DS target, yesterday. It didn't go well at all!

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Having solved the "gap" issue from last night's post, I spent some time fiddling with the actual game.

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Already the scaling is causing quirks!!



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I did a little coding, yesterday, but nowhere near enough to be worthy of blogging about.
Instead, I sat and played quite a lot of Words With Friends (Username : Jayenkai, if you want to join in) and watched a ton of random bits and pieces on YouTube.

I've been watching a lot of Disneyland-Secrets things, lately, and I'm not really sure why. TPMVids filled an alarming amount of my time, last night.

Either it's the hot weather, or it's my mind's way of saying "Hey, I wrote this whole 3DS thing.. Let me rest, now!!"

Hopefully today will be a little more productive.
The weather's still warm, though!

I can happily code in all kinds of weather, but when it's sunny, things start to slow down a whole bunch.

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The epic Flappadiddle-Doo is now available on 3DS Homebrew.
95% of the game is intact, but the tiled backgrounds have vanished due to "I haven't added buffer-drawing to the 3DS Framework yet!" reasons.

Otherwise, it's pretty much identical.
6 worlds, 6 birds, 6 endless modes, and a whole lot of flappiness!

You can Download Flappadiddle-Doo here for Windows, Linux, MacOS and now 3DS Homebrew, too!!

(I'm going to need to make 3DS Cases, now, aren't I!?!)

I might add a few extra functions for primitive drawing, or maybe a setting somewhere or something.
It's not too much of an issue, in that I know why it's drawing things at different scales, but it'd be a little easier if I didn't have to worry about whether something's going to be "The same scaled position as the larger desktop version" or "The exact location on the screen"

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Although the 3DS games I've posted so far have looked reasonably well presented, there's been some horrible scaling and colouring issues all over the 3DS code!

Today I took the time to fix up a lot of the issues, and now I'm quite confident that scaling is no longer an issue, as long as you stick to percentages of the screen, rather than exact co-ordinates.

Exact co-ordinates don't do any fancy scaling, as I've found that tilemaps and the like start to get a bit screwy if you assume one scale or the other.
Although, once I've coded a few dozen tilemaps, I might change my mind!!



For now, the left is a downsized window, and the right is the 3DS Emulator, and you'll see they're more or less exact.

The two "Bloke" sprites are slightly lower on the 3DS, due to them using screen co-ordinates (32 pixels from the top) instead of a percentage.
I didn't want to "break" exact co-ordinates, so .. Yeah.. It's all gotten fairly complicated, if I'm honest

Each 3DS game will still require a little tweaking to make sure it functions accurately, but today's scaling should make it all a little bit easier.

95% of Flappadiddle now works on the 3DS, but it still needs a bunch of tweaking to be done, in order to get it nicely 3DS worthy.

Like the level select menu...



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With the 3DS onslaught in full swing, and this week's game being delayed, what better time than to stop and pause, and think about the other myriad of things that I'd like to do..?!

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D'oh!

Well, I did say that Franken-Hopper was a little bit *too* difficult.
.. Now it's the exact opposite.



Needs more death, now.

Today's been a weird day, code-wise!!

Today, I've rejigged a lot of the framework's opening memory gubbins, although not the way I'd've liked.
In the end, rather than solving my memory management issues, I actually ended up stripping out the largest array completely, meaning that all additional lines (ship trail, bullet trail, explosion trails) in "On a Space Shooting Trail" are all now missing on the 3DS edition.
They're not anything you'll specifically miss, especially on the tiny 3DS screen, but .. they're definitely gone!

Anyhoo, after tweaking away, I finally got On A Space Shooting Trail running on 3DS, so .. Upload Gets!
It includes oodles of 3d-ness, but with everything being thin and small, it's not really all that noticeable.
Aw well..



I've uploaded a fixed 3DSHomebrew version of Micro Clampett (because I'd previously forgot to set the music volume!) as well as the new (for 3DS) space shooter, On a Space Shooting Trail.

Both should be working fine, but as always, let me know if they don't!

I've found a number of minor issues with Micro Clampett, like how I'd forgotten to add the Music Volume setting to the Music Channel. D'oh!
My mind seems to be enjoying doing all these little fixes a lot more than working on actual games, at the moment, so I'm just going to keep doing that until I get bored!!!

We'll hold off Franken-Hopper until next week, and hopefully I'll come up with a more interesting gameplay style for it.
At the minute he can definitely hop, but then he tends to die rather quickly.

Balancing "Collect" with "DIE!" is proving rather hard for poor Frankie.
Although, you'll be all too aware, I do like a difficult game, I don't really like them when it's unfairly difficult, and right now Franken-Hopper's a little unfair.
It's not a problem I can fix in the next day and a half, so.. Let's call it a fail, mess about with 3DS a bit more, and next week I'll give Frankie a better chance.

Unless I get bored with that idea and move onto something else... Which definitely happens FAR too often!

1. Finish off the Franken-Jumper game.
2. Rewrite my giant Array declarations.

.. Oh, and then double check that the new stuff works on all targets.

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I tried to compile "On a Space Shooting Trail" for 3DS tonight, but it wasn't having any of it!
Seems that my habit of creating giant arrays, at launch, isn't very good when it comes to trying to then run them on the limited 3DS.
It seems that if I "alloc" the big arrays at a later point, they tend to work better than if I try to just declare "I'm having a ginormous array, here!", right at the start of the code.

The task, then, will be to rewrite a significant part of "On a Space Shooting Trial" and hope that it fits into memory afterwards! I'll also need to double-check that it still works on the normal Desktop edition, too!
I'll also look into moving the main Framework's Obj/Plr/Grid/Stars arrays into a similar alloc method.

I'm learning quite a lot of good optimisation skills, doing 3DS, and it's all going back into the permanent Framework for future reuse.

I have no idea.
Feels a bit like NeonPlat, and I'm slightly tempted to just make NeonPlat instead!!

After spending hours retweaking the 3DS part of the framework, I'm now mostly confident that everything's a little more compatible.

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I sat around waiting for feedback from the GBATemp community, in the hope that I might be able to fix up any potential issues with my 3DS Framework.
Nothing arrived.
I've left it there for 3 days, and... Nothing...

So, here's release #2. Micro Clampett on the 3DS.


View on YouTube

You can Download Micro Clampett here.

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