Making an Atari game – Day 25

Today I cleaned up some code. Realized I could use on..goto commands like case commands in other languages to save some space. So I used that to determine which enemies appear on each floor. This managed to save quite a few bytes in that bank.

The first mid boss I created
The first mid boss I created

 I also created a mid boss. I found it felt like a long trek between each dragon (endboss) in the game, being every 8 floors. So to switch it up, kind of a halfway point, I thought I could sacrifice every 4th floor between the 8 as another endboss floor. I just had enough space in bank 4 to check the floors and change the player1 enemy’s size to double his size. Therefor making him a larger kind of monster (mid boss). There were only 3 bytes left in the bank after I did this. Now in the bank that creates the stats, I just have to give him more hitpoints I think to make him a little more challenging than regular monsters.

One bad thing about increasing the hitpoints is that right now the player can just stand beside the enemy and keep hitting the button over and over until the enemy is dead. This doesn’t make for a very challenging enemy, even if it has a ton of hitpoints. Just makes him more of a chore to kill. So I need to do something about that at some point if I can. Either make the enemy move away after being hit (which is more difficult then it sounds, because it gets weird when enemies can’t cross each others paths, so that there is no flicker in the game) or have a ball or another obsticle in the room bounching around so that the player is forced to move to avoid it and not stay in one place very long, swinging his sword.

 Also, since every fourth mid boss floor has the same enemies on it, the mid boss ends up being the same guy everytime. I may have to look into this in the future as well, because it would be a lot cooler if each of the other monsters were also seen doubled in size and stronger as a midboss, instead of fighting the same guy over and over.