Total Battle!

It's been quite a while since I uploaded the devlog... These months were difficult being locked at home with the kids, even though I was able to make some progress.

The top border is used as part of the game screen in earth levels, which is cool. However the lack of border compromised the smooth vertical scrolling so a virtual border had to be added. This is somehow easy if the border is black as you can disable the VIC rendering there, but in this game the border is "sky colour" and required some extra trickery.  Besides the transitions suffer jitter if sprites are passing through the border (as they do in this game). This happened also at the bottom panel transition. So I added NMI timer-based interrupts to handle the jitter, using the "double-timer" trick which is quite cool. Now smooth vertical scrolling works fine, even with plenty of sprites everywhere.

I also wanted to test the limits of the game engine so I created an special stage with 6 simultaneous enemies. The data for each robot is now banked in ROM so I can dynamically use any character in real-time.  As you see in the video below the engine handles plenty of sprites really fine. The sprite buffer is able to handle double-buffered 24 sprites, supporting single (1x1) sprites, 1x2, 2x1 and 2x2 characters practically glitch-free.

Currently I'm working on the underwater level with different gravity, physics, etc. Mazinger Z struggled in the underwater fights as most of the weapons are not useful there, and I will try to recreate that feel in the water levels.