#Sprites

Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way, my attempt at writing a game from scratch for the Agon Light, using nothing but C. This time I create a tilemap system.

In this video, I dive headfirst into coding a tilemap engine for my game — no plan, just pure momentum. Everything seems to go great… until I slam into a brick wall: I have no idea how to actually integrate it into my game.

Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way. This time I’m programming some basic enemy behaviours to test out my game’s entity handling code. Things don’t go to plan however and I discover some quite major problems with the physics and tilemap code.

Part of the fun of making a game from scratch is desinging the systems that run in the background. This time I accidentally try to program a cooperative multitasking operating system. But it’s OK, this is how you do this sort of thing…

In this video, I’ll show you how I built a tilemap system from scratch in C for the Agon Light, and integrated it into my existing game engine. Getting the physics engine to handle collisions with the tilemap was no easy task, but I’ll walk you through how I made it work. On top of that, I explore some game design, sketching out ideas for where the game is heading.

Early computers weren’t powerful enough to draw full-screen moving graphics, so they had to use clever tricks. Let’s explore how Nintendo’s techniques for creating tile-based games on the NES can be applied to modern hardware. Using these methods, I built a scrolling tilemap system for the Agon Light using C programming.

What do you do when you’re trying to debug code, but your debugging isn’t working, and you need to debug your debugger?

An overview of the Spectrum Next’s hardware sprites

How I wrote a game in a week using just my web browser.

How writing code for a 40 year old computer made me a better computer science teacher.