Another blog post about my C64 RPG:

Well, I tried adding a night mode, especially for the Arrival cutscenes, and it looks pretty good I think! I’ve added a system that changes the character multi-colours to blues, plus auto-changes the character colour table to shades of blue. You can see the difference in the following images:

After a rearrange of the sprites, I’ve added walking for the female characters and Smokey during the cutscenes, and it looks so much better! I did have an issue with Briley’s sprites; in the new world she is depicted wearing a dress, but at home she’s dressed in blue trousers/top.

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Swapping/loading sprites proved to complicate things as the female characters share the same sprites (to save RAM), so I made life easy for myself: the dress sprites are always loaded and thus always accessible. All I had to do is load Briley’s Home sprites into the area of RAM I’ve reserved for the combat sprites.

You see, Briley starts the game in our world. The player has to work out how to get her across to the new world… The important thing is, there’s no combat in the first (short) part of the game, so the whole combat sprite area is available.

I’ve also coded the sleeping system. There will be several ways to restore Briley and Smokey’s health, using potions (created or bought), visiting guesthouses in other towns/villages, and lastly her bed. When Briley returns to and interacts with her bed at the Baxter’s house, it triggers the Sleep cutscene. There will be limits on the ability to activate this, as at first Briley will be working for Clarissa Baxter making deliveries, and Clarissa will be insisting her deliveries are made before Briley can call it a day…

I feel like I’m pushing things pretty hard with this game of mine. Code space is slowly dwindling, but I’m able to use the cutscene system for a lot of otherwise memory consuming code/text/data. My cutscene system not only has byte command streams and text, but it can also contain code and sprites, so any bespoke parts of the code won’t consume precious code RAM.

I’ve reserved RAM for the music; I hope it’s enough, but time will tell… If I run out, I can always load different music data files, so I do have a backup plan.

I’ve mapped out where all my sprites go in RAM, and if I use sane limits (and a few tricks) there’s enough space for everything I need.

I’m worried about background variety as I’m running out of characters in my charset. But I do have a plan. If I sacrifice two RAM pages (512 bytes), that would give me an additional 64 characters to play with. I’m thinking of doing a character swap when Briley enters the inside of a house. This way I can swap out the tree/bush graphics for interior graphics. Will mean I’ll have to change my graphics editor to cope with charset banks, but that’s not a problem; an advantage of having one’s own custom editor.

Despite the worries, I’m confident I can finish this game. But it won’t be easy…

Well, I wanted a challenge, and I’ve got one!