Today I wrote the code that spawns the final endboss of the game. The code simply checks if the last dragon is dead, if so it then places the final endboss at the bottom of the screen. I also placed the tracking missile object in Y location value 199. This is far below the screen so it doesn’t appear for a while as it makes it’s way up to the player. I did this to give the player a little more of a chance to get some free hits in because I feel the game may be difficult enough as it is. Plus it’s a nice short break in between battles.
One thing I thought would be really cool to add to the game is a reward for killing the Dragons. Where the most treasure I can drop in a given room is three coins, this isn’t really possible. I would like a little bit bigger of a reward for slaying a difficult Dragon. So what I came up with was to turn the entire next floor after the dragon into a treasure floor. This way it kind of feels like the Dragon was guarding it’s treasure and you get to collect after slaying the beast. The way I did this was to just basically make the Atari kill all the enemies on the Treasure floor as soon as the player enters the room. This way, no monsters are seen and the coins appear in every room for the reward. I also made all of the treasure floors gold in colour to emphasize this.
One thing I found with the treasure floors was that it wasn’t very smooth or fun to run through with some of the rooms being rooms with obsticles (walls) in the way that you had to navigate to get to the next room. So I solved this by making every room a corridor (hallway). So it’s more of running through a series of tunnels collecting gold then rooms. Pretty happy with how this turned out.
I also changed the way the code colours each floor. This will also help for making the Game 3 Random dungeons randomly coloured as well.
Quick notes on some other things I squeezed in:
- Redesigned some of the monsters a bit and added a cool Skeleton guy that ended up being mine and my girlfriend’s favourite enemy.
- Play tested the crap out of it, trying to set the difficulty to a fair pace.
- “Think” I fixed a bug where the player will hit an enemy just on the top of it’s head, the sound effect will play as if it were hit but no damage was taken by the enemy.
- Removed Easter Egg Room which saved enough graphic space to add a cool Easter Egg (Telling you more about this kind of defeats the purpose of the Easter Egg so I guess I’ll just leave it at this. :p )
I Found Huge amount of unused Code in Bank 5 (I completely forgot I set this chunk of code aside a long time ago in case I needed to go back to it), Deleted it and saved 600 Bytes to play with 😀 Not sure what I am going to do with it yet…. Maybe try rearanging some code into Bank 5 and free some space in Bank 6 to have sound effects for the Enemies shooting (Throwing projectiles) 😮