Shovel Duck II : Dig Duck!
2024-06-14: Shovel Duck II : Bonus Game 3 : A Mousive Panic Released!
"Hi Bill," says Money. "I see you've cleared out all of the worms that escaped the mine."
"I have indeed," replies Bill, "It was tough, inexplicably bouncy work, but I managed it."
"But what about all the skulls?" asks Money, "They're still roaming around causing trouble!"
"Well, if you want to take care of them... I'm not going to stop you..."
"I'd have preferred the worms..."
Money Mouse is back in the third Bonus game, free with Shovel Duck II : Dig Duck. Sort out the roaming skulls in a small number of, ever increasingly difficult, arcade style levels. In a game that has been hugely influenced by the classic Universal Arcade game, "Space Panic!" Money needs to dig holes, trap skulls, and then bash them repeatedly over the heads to send them to their doom.
If you trap a skull, but don't bash it, it will escape after a few seconds. If you're unlucky it may don an eyepatch and have piracy on it's mind. (Don't be a pirate kids, it leads to dramatic boat battles, horrific news stories and terrible seaman jokes.) Now it gets trickier. Pirate Skulls are a bit tougher and have to fall further to splat.
Trap a pirate skull, but don't bash it? Well, you may find that Pirate has aims at the monarchy and will wear a crown and be a regal king skull. Please, don't try and work out where these costume changes come from. Just assume it's the same place cats store their extra mass that enables the smallest one to take up all the space on a three-seater sofa!
There's a bonus that ticks down that you can get to add to your score, and you'll get an extra life every 4,000 points you get (awarded end of level though - you have to survive to get your bonus!) and you'll get bonus points for each floor the skull falls through after the first.
Good luck!
This game was created using MPAGD by Jonathan Cauldwell. the briefest of tunes was created in Beepola, and ZX-Editor, ZX-Blockeditor and ZX-Paintbrush were used in tweaking the default tape file generated from MPAGD.
Keys are redefinable, but by default are:
O = Left, P = Right, Q = Up, A = Down, M = Dig, H = Pause
I think I got all the bugs out of this one, but I'm still playtesting and if I spot something game-breaking (that I can fix) I'll update the tape with a new version. Only thing I might change (if I can get it working) is a slightly better lock-on alignment for digging; but that's something for future me to worry about / forget about / hey, I should really get back to coding bonus game 2...
Comments
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Very good "Bonus game", thank you. I also added it to my new "Gameplay of New ZX Spectrum games from June 2024" video.
Thank you for doing that; looks like June had a number of good games released, and a bit of variety in there. I think you caught a couple I'd not heard about.
Nice game. I also like how the text is animated when a skull or the player dies.
2 observations from the video:
1. Is it (too) easy to dig a whole left and right of you and just camp?
2. Too bad the skulls at the upper level aren't visible.
Hi there, thanks for the comments.
Regarding your observations.
1. First couple of levels, that definitely helps. However as you progress, there are skulls that need to drop at least 2 or 3 levels; which forces you to move about and dig more holes in line with each other.
(I've captured a little animation and included it above which includes pirate skulls (need to drop 2 levels) and king skulls (need to drop 3) which hopefully illustrates this - also shows you getting a line of holes planned and then another skull walks into one and you have to move to re-dig the hole once the skull gets free).
2. Skulls on the upper level should be visible. I've observed the behaviour at the beginning of Sabreman's video a few times during development and it usually relates to memory issues (i.e. running out of the 48K available). Later in the video it appears to correct itself (on the 2nd or 3rd playthrough) so I have to assume it corrected itself. In my playtests of the final game I've not seen a repeat of those issues.
I have noticed a couple of minor bugs which I've corrected now and am playtesting to confirm they've not broken anything. I've also increased the speed of the pirate skulls to make them a little harder to avoid. Assuming I see no further bugs, I'll upload the bug-fixed version in a few days time. Note there is a slightly different colour scheme (as per the animation above) to distinguish between v1 and v2 of the game. I think I prefer the green ladders and being able to identify if I'm digging or filling in the holes.
Thank you for your reply.
I see, that makes sense and indeed looks more challenging :)
I'll buy the game(s) and check it out. Again, nice works.
I've just played the game. Good fun :)
I do experience skulls at the top not being visible though. The mouse also disappears when going there.
I tested in both SpecEmu and InkSpector - both 48k and 128k machines.
It's not an attr issue, as I removed them and there are no pixels.
Thank you for giving the game a go and testing it in specEmu and inkSpector. I suspect the invisible sprites at the top of the screen are a memory issue rather than an attributes one. I'm currently fixing a couple of minor bugs, but the skull code could be optimized a bit better (a lot of duplicated code). I'll see if I can reduce that down and hopefully that'll get rid of the issue on the top lines at the same time. I should have an updated version later this week and hopefully it'll fix that issue too. Thank you again for having a look.
Nice!
Thank you for giving the game a go and for sharing the video! Have a great weekend!