Tongueman's Logic Information Page

Tongueman's Logic work-in-progress report, July 2007

My game is slowly coming together and completion seems near. Some people may be disappointed by the slow pace of its development, but remember it's just me doing all the work, and I am going at it at a leisurely pace specifically because it is but one hobby of mine among many. I work on it when I have some free time, and when there are no games that I want to play. This has kept me from ever feeling bogged down by a big project. Recently my attention has also been drawn towards the old Nintendo NES, thanks to a little piece of magic called the PowerPak.

What I have been doing recently is dabbling with another map, this time imagining the Bonk world in an isometric format. This'll be the new map for the 10x10 puzzles.

I rather like how it turned out!

Tongueman's Logic work-in-progress report, March 2007

Well, news of my game development has been pretty scant, hasn't it? A few people have asked me whether I'm still working on the game, and when it will come out. I am working on the game, slowly but surely. From about May-September 2006, I hardly worked on the game. Life and all its sucker-punches to the heart got in the way, as it usually does. In the Fall, I worked on better graphics for my Puzzle Select screen, so here is what I have so far:

As you can see, I was aiming for the old demo-style look. Those balls rotate around the selection table and spell out "PUZZLE". Don't worry; it looks much better in motion. Also worth mentioning is a new splash screen with my name that I have added to the game. (No pics for now; I want it to be a surprise, heh.)

I've also added a whole new map to the in-game portion of my game. Yep, it's that good old "electronics-style"that every Amiga-type game has got to have. :-)

Other things I've worked on are not obvious, but they are improving the quality of the game. I've added BRAM (Backup RAM) saving, so that players can save their highest rank for each puzzle that's been completed. That's a nice way to save your scores and try to keep improving on them, eh? I've also eliminated some bugs here and there, and most recently, gone through each puzzle to make sure its difficulty is appropriate. I've edited or scrapped some puzzles that were impossible to complete without expert skills. So, the game should have a very nice, gradual learning curve. The largest puzzles will still be a challenge, believe me!

PCE games can display graphics in a high resolution -- up to 512x240 pixels, and even more horizontally. The problem is that few emulators (none?) display this size. A few can do the high-resolution mode (512 horizontal) that is used in just a few games and demos. But the bigger problem is the vertical resolution. Many games display 240 lines in the game, but all the emulators I tried show just 224 lines. Thus, we don't get the full view of the playing field when running PCE games in an emulator.

Here are a few examples, taken from a handful of PCE games that I randomly chose. I captured the screens on the left from the emulator Magic Engine. I can't directly capture the PCE's output, so I took a photograph of the screen from my video monitor. Don't worry, the exact same image is seen from a normal TV.

As you can see, many games that I tested have a vertical resolution of 240 lines, but they are cut down to 224 lines in Magic Engine. Why, now?

But of course, the real reason for my chagrin is that my game has puzzles that go up to 30x30 tiles in size. That's a full 240 lines of the screen. On a real PCE, the largest puzzle almost nearly fits onto the screen, whereas in most PCE emulators, two rows in the puzzle are cut off! Same goes with the timer in the corner; it has the top 8 pixels missing. It isn't like this on the real system, folks.

Um, I don't mean to be a bother, but could you emu authors fix this, please?