Dave the Dragon

About

Dave the Dragon is/was going to be a platformer for the Atari STE, built using A(tari) G(ame) T(ools) from DML.

Updates

14/03/24

Forgot to write any updates, but I have made some reasonable progress getting Dave back up and running over the last couple of months. The code now compiles and runs again, and I've started playing around with a tool called LDtk (Level Design Tool Kit) which is a very comprehensive map editor with auto-tiling and the like and whole slew of export options. I used it to build a quick and dirty new map, and wrote a simple tool to translate the CSV of collision data into a binary format. I forget how I defined tiles originally (circa 2017) and need to put in support for different kinds of surfaces and walls. Still, it's nice to see Dave hopping around once more.

I'm unsure at this stage whether or not I'll continue to use it, so more experiments are needed, it does seem like a good option though. I've found a quirk with AGT (probably there by design) that means I can't render the left-most column of 16x16 tiles - I think it's a safety margin but seems odd that it's not filled with something else pushing the actual map content over. I've read into the AGT code a bit, but not enough to ascertain exactly what's going on, and at this stage

Clearly looking at this latest screen shot in comparison to the old one the colours are more muted, something to work out will be what AGTs colour palette file looks like and find a way to convert my exact one over rather than have it try and do a best guess from a collection of high colour images as it's built to do.

27/06/23

On pause because the STF is on my desk instead of the STE. I purchased an Ultradev cart to aid with debugging but as of yet have not got code into the project that will output to the cart. Hopefully back in action soon.

07/09/23

Unpaused. Ish. Starting on getting the tool chain sorted again as detailed in some recent posts.