2019

This is the first piece of art I have finished for Deepstone Catacomb’s manual. It’s slowly but surely coming along. I tend to sit down with a nice hot cup of coffee and draw throughout the night. Taking my time with it and enjoying the whole process.

I sent ZeroPage Homebrew the first beta to play/review on their show. The first show went quite well but a small bug involving the Master Sword appeared. I made some last minute changes to how the Master Sword Appears the night before and kind of broke it 😬. The bug basically made the Master Sword only appear in the game about 50% of the time.

I thought about it at work and kind of realized it would be an easy fix. Fixed it when I got home that morning. The next day (Friday) I tuned into ZeroPage on their Twitch live show, and they happened to finish the game they were playing (Spider Fighter) early and decided to give Deepstone Catacomb another go. So the second video below is that play through with the updated binary of the game (Master Sword bug fixed version).

Please Like and Subscribe if you enjoy it. ZeroPage plays great new homebrews for the 2600 a couple times a week and some other retro consoles on rare occasions.

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I finished up the Game 3 variation. There is now random enemy swarms on each floor. I also made it so after floor 64 (if anyone ever gets that far, I doubt I even will), the game will no longer drop helpful items like chicken or mushrooms for the player. I also made an enemy speed limit so the game doesn’t ever break. The fastest an Enemy can move now is 6.0 pixels per frame, which is insanely fast. However the fireballs can reach up to 8.8 pixels per frame which is very insanely fast. They may get stuck in a wall here or there going this speed but should be able to bounce back out. The average player will never get to see them go this fast, god knows if anyone ever will. If someone were to manage to get to Floor 100, it will appear as floor 00, and then roll back to floor 01 after that. The speed will still remain maxed out at that point however. If you are that good, you are no longer human… you are a machine.

At the very end I managed to squeeze in a few more sound effects. I got the steps down the ladder sounds at the end of each level in there now.. This made a huge difference. I always wanted that in there but didn’t think it was gonna fit. I also added another sound for the beginning of each floor. This also makes a big difference I find, in feeling like a real game. Which I guess it really is at this point. So I guess it’s safe to say…

The game is fucking done guys!

This was a crazy challenge that I managed to do in 30 days over a period of six months. I took this on as a small side project to kind of wrap up quickly. Gave myself a 30 day deadline but really didn’t realize that while working a 12 hour night shift and also having fun/spending quality time with my girlfriend, that it was really hard to get 30 free days to program.

It doesn’t end here though. I’m going to beta test the hell out of the code (which I’ve been doing all along as well) and begin creating the artwork for the manual, cartridge, and box. I will also need to create a page dedicated to this game as well on this site. This should be really fun. I will share all of this as I go along as well, but from here on out it definitely won’t be daily updates. They will be very far and few between.

A lot more work ahead, but man does it feel good to have a complete, working, playable game.

Also, I have emailed Albert Yarusso from AtariAge and sent him the version of the game I have completed so far to see if he would be interested in selling this game in cartridge form.