Hi to all,
finally I decided to start coding my personal game, and as first PICO-8 project I will design a "Choplifter" style game. I am not going to make an arcade conversion but something a little bit different.
My goal is to enjoy while learning PICO-8 by doing, and in second place I need something special to do that will keep me alive in this particular moment of my life.
Choplifter is a game by SEGA where the player has to pilot an helicopter (Bell UH-1 Huey) to rescue hostages from enemy bases.
I will post all my work in progress steps of my "AP8kalypse" game here, meanwhile this is the gameplay from the arcade:
URL Choplifter gameplay
Since I love helicopters, which I think are one of the most amazing flying machines ever invented, I will start the work from the flight system.
In Choplifter the flight of the helicopter is beautiful and fun, and the simulation of the controls and inertia are not bad at all.
As a first step I am working on the engine and the collective pitch that tilts the blades of the helicopter to generate lift. The command that does this in the game is the UP direction, which progressively increases the throttle and then the lift of the helicopter. But when the player lets go of the controls, the throttle gently loses power, so the helicopter loses altitude.
To connect the speed of the blades animation to a hypothetical engine force, I used a counter that increases at every frame, and at every screen update a logical 'AND' operation is performed between the counter and the value of the throttle.
By pressing the UP button the throttle is progressively increased, and from time to time this value Well used as an Index To extract from a table the second value for the AND operation. The values present in the table are nothing more than values for bit shift calculations.
Every time a frame for the blade animation is Changed, an event is generated to play the blade sound effect.
From the example given the technique is easily understood.
For now I'm happy with the general effect, but as always, any critic or suggestion is appreciated. See you next time.
I have drawn the "AP8kalypse" title very quickly, just to have something nicer than a simple text in these posts.
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