Another tool to help make my new Spectrum game

My game development is progressing well, with the “TODO” list quickly getting smaller. I have one important function to write that I know will take some time. For now I have put that to one side and concentrated on getting the rest of the game finished. One feature of the game is the various text messages that need to be shown between levels etc. As I am using a cut down list of characters it was easier to create a tool to convert them. It was about an hour’s work to create the conversion tool shown below. It has a few more features than are really needed but it seemed like a good time to add them. No need to get out the calculator to work out the screen and attribute addresses. In the next few days I will pass the game to my tester. I can then start on the last big function and look to fix and bugs the appear during testing. The final chunk of work will just be the polishing and the replacement of the placeholder graphics.

Updating the tool for my games levels

I found some time to update the program that I will use to design my game levels. I fixed a few small bugs and added some new features. The status bar now shows the currently selected shape name and the total number of shapes used. I have also added a print option that will print a giant map of all the levels defined in a text file. I have expanded the raw data comment so that the grid can be resized and redrawn if I need to edit a previous design. Once all the levels have been added to a text file, it is loaded and the levels spread out in a user defined grid pattern. This is then saved as a bitmap. As far as I can tell, this application now does everything I need it to do. I’ll start designing some easy levels to start with and then some more difficult ones. Here is an image of the latest application.