NewsStand v1.1.0

NewsStand is a new game for Commodore 64 (made by AGPX and Phobos), in which our hero Joseph has to collect the money in order to buy cassette tapes with the legendary games for the C64, but many enemies will try to stop him! In Italy, in the 80s, these cassettes were sold on newsstands and it was a thrill every time to return home and try them all. In memory of those magical moments, we made this video game.

Currently the "PAL - Italian" and "PAL - English" versions are available (the NTSC version has slowdown problems in some areas of the game, due to the fact that in the NTSC system we have less CPU time available to race with the rasterbeam and will not be released).

The graphics and animations are entirely made by Phobos with the C64 Graphics Maker:

Sound effects are made by Phobos with Sid Sfx Editor:

The game consists of 2 floppy disks for 1541 (A and B).

Teaser trailer (english): 

Teaser trailer (italian): 

Enjoy!

Release notes:

v1.1.0: Added the ability to retry the current level. Increased the total time of some levels.
v1.0.3: Minor improvement in level 3.
v1.0.2: Improved Frida and final boss collision detection.
v1.0.1: Small fix in the level 2.

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Extra info:

I like to add some technical details (also to answer the recurring question about the lack of realization of the NTSC version):

1) Almost every moving object on the screen is multicolor and hires (320 x 200) and this requires you to use multiple sprites, overlapped. Only the player consists (see the C64 Graphics Maker screenshot above) of 3 overlapping sprites. This layering makes the sprite multiplexer more complicated (we have up to 15 sprites in some screens). For example, the 3 player sprites must be chosen so as to respect the layer order (by design, hardware sprite 0 is on top of all, sprite 1 on top of all others except 0, and so on, so you can't pick them in any order as in the standard algorithm). In level 3, to complicate matters, we have the rain which is nothing more than a sprite that moves rapidly across the screen (reducing the hardware sprites available to the multiplexer to 7).

2) Phobos made a lot of sprites. Level 3 contains 183 (for a total of 11.4Kb). Adding the color memory (1Kb) and the bitmap with its attributes (9Kb), we need almost 21.5Kb. As everyone knows, the VIC-II is not able to see more than 16Kb at a time and therefore I had to implement a sprite caching system (with LRU strategy), where the required sprites are copied in to the remaining 6Kb of the 16Kb (considering the bitmap). To reduce consumption, sprites were drawn in only one direction and then the sprite engine flips them on-the-fly, eventually storing them in the cache in order to avoid the recomputation in near frames.

3) The various screens have been made using 2x2 tiles which increases memory consumption a little, but leaves more freedom in drawing.

4) The game has many variations, not only from level to level, but also from screen to screen the game logic requires some customization. This increases the consumption of RAM and for this reason it's necessary that the game is broken into various parts to be loaded (from disk). The .prg files are big, as I filled almost all 64Kb of RAM in each level. The turbo disk would have been useful, but I haven't had the time to study it or figure out how to add it.

5) In level 4, the degree of customization is maximum. Apart from the player that drives a drone, I had to implement the "Frida" engine that allows her to chase you in the environment, jumping over holes or stopping at the border, decide on which corridor to chase the drone, jump on various objects, dodge bombs of the drone, stop waiting for the right moment and jump up to grab her prey. It wasn't easy at all, probably the hardest part of the whole game (but the game designer was intransigent :-).

6) In other screens you can see bombs or objects thrown with a parabolic motion, which requires fixed point multiplications.

7) I chose not to use GoatTracker 2 for the sound effects, instead relying on my Sid Sfx Editor, because it was easier to implement a sound engine capable of dynamically allocating the 3 voices, offering a priority playback system (less important sounds are stopped or not played at all if there's no free voice in that moment) and offers much more control as it allows you to easily understand which sounds are being played, on which voices and others.

8) Victory screen, with scrolling text, consists of a 320 x 200 16 color screen using Algotech's MUCSU HIRES CONVERTER.

9) In the main screen, in the credits part, the text is hires and use 3 different colors per row.