Below is a short screenshot showing what the re-programmed version of the game is looking like. As I noted on my site:

"For those who have played previous versions of the game from back in 2000, you will notice a few things, such as the tileset graphics being improved (now looking much more like the Amiga original), some minor interface changes, and things such as status bar text no longer halting gameplay, and items on the ground now flash so that they're easier to identify / find."

Many years ago I made a game called Thunderbirds, which was based on the Amiga game of the same name, which was of course based on the 1960's TV series (if you haven't seen the original TV series, you're missing out - no matter how campy the puppets & dialogue are, it's amazing!). It's basically a "platform puzzle/rpg" type game.

Early last year I started reprogramming Thunderbirds from scratch, but I never finished it. I've decided to pick up where I left off and see how it goes. This isn't a sequel to the last version, but is essentially the same game redone, programmed much better. I'm doing this mainly for 2 reasons:

- The previous version was all hardcoded in terms of the existing mission, so that it was near on impossible for me to expand on the game and include the remaining three missions.

- The gameplay & controls were very clunky.

Version 2.0.0 will still be for the TI-83 / 83+ / 84+ series of calculators. Coding is probably around 50% completed at a guess. Some of the improvements are:

- Graphics have been touched up, in particular I'm no longer "borrowing" the earth tiles from Sqrxz, I've drawn new ones that look more like the original Amiga game.

- Missions (or levels) and all their applicable code & data are stored in external files, so that if I decide to go back and add any of the remaining three missions later on, it's fairly straight forward.

- Controls have been adjusted and simplified.

- Gameplay is no longer so stop/start all the time when text hints come up.

- Items sitting about the place now flash so that they're easier to identify, instead of just blending in with the background.

I'll post updates as I get more done and probably some screenshots, here and also on http://www.jvti.org.

I completely uninstalled zStart (even the "run on RAM Clear" option), made a RAM Clear and ran AB5M through MirageOS and it still tells me "File ZAB5E1F1 missing"
I haven't tried with DoorsCS. It's been a while since I removed it from my calc.

Quote from: Sorunome on September 30, 2012, 12:56:34 pm

Try enetering mirage and then running the game again via zstart, i was having always some problem running through a shell with zstart with certain versions

That didn't work either

I'll try on my 83+ if it works there

Sorry to hear you're still having issues Hayleia That's very weird though if you did a full RAM clear with zStart uninstalled and the game still can't find the data file. It must be having some problem locating the MirageOS library functions perhaps?

Another thing you could try is downloading the TI-83+/84+ Ion version and using that with zStart. My Ion version doesn't call any external library functions, they're all built into the game code (which I had to do as I was breaking the 8.8KB code limit with Ion). If that still doesn't work, feel free to let me know and I'll see what else I can do


And thanks DJ_O / tr1p1ea / Art_of_camelot!

Yeah Tower Assault (which was AB3) and Final Assault (AB4) were separate games And that's great to hear that you liked Thunderbirds too! Thanks for the feedback on AB5! I've made some notes so if/when I'm working on an update down the track I'll come back and look at these suggestions That would be really cool if it gets featured on ticalc.org, we'll see if it happens

I have problems running it. I run it with zStart, with MirageOS absorbed but then it says that the ZAB5E1F1 file is missing even though I have it in my archive

That sucks... I'm not very familiar with zStart, so I'll download it and try it myself and see what I can find. Does the game work if you run it directly through MirageOS or DoorsCS?

I'm happy to report that Alien Breed 5 will be released within the next week or so. I just have two minor glitches to fix up and it's finished

To celebrate, I put together this short video showing all my various attempts at porting Alien Breed to the TI range over the years. As you can see, it's changed a bit over the years!

A beta version with the first 2 levels of the game is now available here:

http://www.jvti.org/files/programs/ab5/ab5beta.zip

If anyone finds any bugs, I'd be most appreciative if they're mentioned here (or to me via email) so that I can rectify them

Can't wait to try it! And yeah, you work fast

You also seem to have quite a level editor there. Any plans to someday make that a general-purpose tilemap editor?

That's not a bad idea, it wouldn't be too hard for me to do an alternate version of the editor that was more generic, loading a specified tileset file and then a specified map based on that tileset, and without all the AB5 specific data. Definitely something I'd be happy to do if someone needed it

Quote from: V1mes on August 20, 2012, 12:50:26 pm

That just looks amazing...
 

^This.
I'm sure that'll make dev that much easier. I'd definetley prefer to look at my levels in a much more zoomed out view like that. Creating them on calc would be more of a pain. It'd be a lot harder to get a good feel of levels as a whole.

Thanks guys! It is definitely much easier editing on the computer and being able to view the whole level. Also since those last screenshots, I changed the white & black tile colours to a pale green / grey & black colour theme, so that it looks on computer screen almost identical to what it does on the calc

I've now just started serious bug testing and doing general game testing so that I can balance the game.

I'm happy to report that 99.9% of "required" coding is complete. That is to say, if bug testing & balancing were complete, the game would be ready for release.

However, there is still one more optional extra that I have in mind that I'll experiment with as well.

I've finally been spending some time playing on my actual TI-83 & TI-84+ calculators as opposed to WabbitEmu, and I'm really happy with how it looks, particulary on the TI-84+ LCD.

The last few days have been spent on a few asthetics, such as: level exploding animation when the self destruct timer expires; some nice little fade in & fade out transitions; (as suggested by Merth) I've included the descending deck lift animation between levels; plus a few other very minor things.

I could post a couple of screenshots, although the fade in / fade out contrast effects don't quite work exactly right on WabbitEmu as they do on calc - they're close, but it's much more seamless on an actual calc screen