Let's try that again... after releasing Shovel Duck II  Shovel Mouse One : A Mouseive Panic last week I became aware of a couple of bugs. Some of them minor. Some of them major. When I test my games I use the emulators FUSE, Speccy 4.8 (the version bundled with MPAGD) and ZXDS and I hadn't noticed any problems. However, Saberman posted a video that showed the top row of the screen as sometimes having invisible skulls (and, later confirmed as an issue in SpecEmu and InkSpector by Xorrox). This is not the intended behaviour. In MPAGD there is an upper "code must not exceed this size" limit of about 39095 Bytes. After this point, things start getting a little funky.

Now SDII/SMO-AMP was near this limit. I don't believe I'd exceeded it, but it may well have been close enough to cause some odd and unreliable behaviours. 

Not to worry. My routines for the skulls were a bit ... inefficient... with lots of repetition; so combine, trim, squeeze the common bits together and Robert's your mother's brother. Or something like that.

If it was that simple... I'd have released an updated version about a week ago. A few more bugs crept in. I think I've squashed them, but I'm still playtesting and I'll see if any will re-surface.

Bugs fixed

memory related issues - hopefully - if anyone sees odd invisible sprites, please let me know. I think if it works without issue in SpecEmu then that's a good sign. Through the optimization of code, I've saved about 3KB... 

missing bonus lives - sometimes the running total for life bonus was failing to catch a check and lives were not getting rewarded on the screen at the end of each level. This was simply a case of needing to check a little more frequently. It should now be fixed.

random skull errors - now I had seen this earlier in development, but thought I'd fixed it. However, during the fixing of other errors it came back. This, essentially is a skull escaping either a hole or partial hole trap, and instead of going where they should, they would respawn between two levels and drop some wall blocks in the way; making a barrier you couldn't get around - and often they couldn't get down from. This should be fixed.

more skull errors - after compacting some of the common skull routines, I started getting errors where skulls would get stuck to the left or right of ladders. I think this was related to the "chase the player" code; I've added a few clauses and reduced the aggressiveness of some of the pursuing skulls. I think this was a temporary issue and is now fixed. Of course I always think that and then two skulls bump ugly and someone's stuck right where they shouldn't be!

digging - not actually a bug. I'm just not happy about how Money digs and the game tries to auto-align you to the right blocks. Facing right wasn't too much of a problem. Facing left though, that sometimes missed and got you a little to the left of the block you were trying to hit. I think I've improved this, but I could also have made it worse. 

digging - sometimes you could dig as you fell which created some impossible situations - either with you digging wall blocks in mid air that couldn't be removed, or digging away wall blocks that you shouldn't be able to remove. I think this was a temporary issue during bugfixing, but fixed now. I think.

Additionally.

I've tweaked a couple of the levels. Either adding, moving or removing ladders. Not a huge difference, but hopefully helps avoid floating skulls.

I've also added an additional level to the game. I probably could add more, but don't want to get any closer to the upper memory limit for MPAGD.

I've swapped the skulls and mice (yes, that's what those are meant to be) on the menu screen.

(I think I prefer them looking at each other)

I've added visual cues to the digging.

(If you are digging a hole, it is red on the left and magenta on the right. If you are filling a hole, it's reversed with red on the right and magenta on the left. Additionally the trapped skulls are now green, the ladders are green rather than yellow and the falling skull faces have been... enhanced, shall we say?)

Did I mention the different loading screen? There's a different loading screen.

I think that's everything. I'm still playtesting and hopefully there won't be any additional / new bugs I've not seen springing up. The old version of the game will be no longer available for download; it'll be replaced by this new version.

I hope that's all the bugs. I want to get back to coding bonus game two...