More levels...
Page as &1200 was deliberate for NFS. There's nothing stopping this being higher (within reason) as the data is just moved around afterwards it just affects how much of the screen is corrupted on loading.
Attached is the latest version. This version has individual rooms for all the levels (1-9). Levels have their own colour scheme and enemies get progressively harder. Keys and doors for all levels part from level 7 and enemies up to level 5. However - When I originally envisioned the level storage data structure I thought I would be using arbitrary room seeds. As I've built tools to help design the levels this has turned into seeds that (mostly) go up in number. If I commit to this then I can change the storage of the seeds to be the difference from the last seed (with a base seed per level) meaning I can halve the storage requirement saving around 400 bytes. This will mean reworking the levels as they stand (hopefully this isn't too significant) and there will be some extra logic to generate the rooms but it seems too much of a saving to pass up.
I've also added a couple of slight speed optimisations (page crossing branches mostly) and changed the !BOOT level override to increase your starting stats as the later levels will be quite hard without this.
I could simply add another level with the extra space but nine seems plenty already (made up of 429 individual rooms) so here are some possible other things to I could do with the extra space:
Page as &1200 was deliberate for NFS. There's nothing stopping this being higher (within reason) as the data is just moved around afterwards it just affects how much of the screen is corrupted on loading.
Attached is the latest version. This version has individual rooms for all the levels (1-9). Levels have their own colour scheme and enemies get progressively harder. Keys and doors for all levels part from level 7 and enemies up to level 5. However - When I originally envisioned the level storage data structure I thought I would be using arbitrary room seeds. As I've built tools to help design the levels this has turned into seeds that (mostly) go up in number. If I commit to this then I can change the storage of the seeds to be the difference from the last seed (with a base seed per level) meaning I can halve the storage requirement saving around 400 bytes. This will mean reworking the levels as they stand (hopefully this isn't too significant) and there will be some extra logic to generate the rooms but it seems too much of a saving to pass up.
I've also added a couple of slight speed optimisations (page crossing branches mostly) and changed the !BOOT level override to increase your starting stats as the later levels will be quite hard without this.
I could simply add another level with the extra space but nine seems plenty already (made up of 429 individual rooms) so here are some possible other things to I could do with the extra space:
- Add "Time taken" for each level and a "best time" table (based on game ticks).
- Add a couple more text screens to give a better start game/restart level flow.
- Add an (initial text?) indicator that the room that has been entered contains a key. Opinions on this are welcome. I know I spent many hours searching for keys in Doom but I'm not sure how much "fun" that is.
- Give the levels names - no gameplay benefit just adds atmosphere.
- Any other suggestions?
Statistics: Posted by ChrisB — Wed Jul 02, 2025 8:31 am