It's mainly sprite drawing/generating.

The first is just blitting columns of the same sprite, but the second is more interesting : I'm generating a sprite on-the-fly. I was inspired from xor texture, but couldn't grasp the true form of it in a B&W screen, I remebered of the munching squares demo. It's principally the same mecanism, but animating it is more easier and fun.


EDIT : Some news. I have to take a lot of informations in the original Game.
Here what I know:
-GBA data is little endian. That make resd the data easier... (In fact no)
-Xp caps are 32-bit encoded, in little endian. 100 levels/character...
-Stats are semi-random : with each level we have different and random stats bonus. Eqch 10 levels the game tries to adjust your stats to a predfined stats stored in data... Yup, I need to collect 10*6 stats/character.
-PSI learning table...
-I get more or less 324 bytes to collect and understand per character.
-Line/move/IA databasrs planned... That's again a lot of data...
Oh, and I use now the Text Axiom. I certainly use Pucrunch too. There is a lot of data in this game. FYI the original game barely stays in a 32MB cartridge, the max for a GBA. And it's mostly compressed... Imagine what could they do if they had to do M3 on a 128MB DS cartridge, or 8GB 3DS one!

I'm planning on 24*24 sprites max for monsters, more animated backgrounds (certainly a fire for the third), But for now, I'll start on rolling meters, the main part of the battle engine.

I played again the game, and I noted some near things with these rollers, here is the most interesting:
Some ennemies are littlrally livings bombs-on-legs, and explodes dealing generally mortal damage, but there isn't enough time for our players to die because once the message "YOU WON" is displayed, the odometers stop instantly, even if you litteraly were blown off...

I hope a day playing a lot with this engine. I love how thr odometer add a stressing critical strategy core.

Oh, and what pc/calc tool is available for 24*24 sprites? (Preferably with 8*8 chunks, thanks)

EDIT 2: I started working on game logic (UI and key reaction), It's quite hard and new, because there are only non-modal UI, I need to constantly update game state, not only UI logic. So I started working on the game structure, and that seems quite nice at the moment. I can "select" bash, guard and PSI for character that have the right options... Only the dialog box is shown when  selecting PSI. I need simple stats and at least an ennemy to be fully capable of correctly working...

EDIT 3: I'm now, at this moment, getting some data. I'm getting level stats, and experience level curve. Little endian, so reversed. RomHacking, here I come.

Yeah, I still trying to avoid taking too much place at the moment. It's only the bqttle engine and still It uses 2500 bytes...

Anyway, I refactored a little my code, and it has dynamic sprite pointers! The background sprites doesn't take any static pointer.

I did some UI works, but not still not much to earn interest...

EDIT: I decided that I'll make only the battle engine first, and named it Hinawa. I updated a new version of the demo, (still not a functionnal battle core), with gray backgrounds, speed up HUD (forgot to put back the names), and a forst attempt at UI designing.

Press EXE to show the PSI box, and Shift to change background animations.

To do text sub-routines made me rework on hud routine, because I already used registers in tje Hud, and that made a huge less, and almost erase the main source. So I backed up the version's source you have here.

How should I use variables? Global A-Z? Stored in a list depending of the context?... I'm a bit lost here.

5MHz or whatever ( a monster is named Whatever, it's quire funny).

I saw an Axiom somewhere... I'll dig into it...

Hello everyone!

I found my Hama beads weeks ago, and the more I do pixel art with, the more I love that.

for instance here is a natural response to one of my proejectd

Yes I had to change the comors, Hama palette is quite poor, bu it stills rocks IMO.

I'll certainly post more later. Have you any Hama/perler pretty works here?

This, and zStart seems to make Axe crash more often. I think that's come from the RAM usage...

I think I got a pointer to these unknown errors: I think that's related to RAM allocation for programs. Trying to compile two time a 16kb program made Axe crashed.

Hinawa Battle Engine


[CONTENT IN PROGRESS]

Keys:

• SHIFT : Validate
• ALPHA : Cancel
• Arrow Keys : Move
• Clear : Exit

I should suggest RLE encoding for storing maps. It's quite easy, but if your level looks like swiss cheese, you'll risk space loss. You could calculate how much a compressed and a non-compressed map take place, and take the lightest one.