Introduction

This is the fifth progress report on the development of Payback for the Gameboy Advance. If you haven't read the other reports then you can see them here. The main advances this month were the addition of five new maps, the implementation of the multiplayer mode and improvements to the replay system.

New Cities

Due to the efficient way maps are stored on the GBA version, there was enough room to add five new maps to the game. These were as follows:

Desert Deathmatch

Little Chicago

Tank Warfare

The Killing Zone

Woods

Multiplayer

The multiplayer mode is now fully playable and supports up to four players. Players earn points by killing other players, but lose points if they commit suicide. The winner is the first player to reach a predetermined number of points and extra levels can be unlocked by playing the game in single player mode. All the features from the single player mode are also active in multiplayer so there a wide variety of ways for you to defeat you opponent - you can run them over, push their car into the sea, shoot them or blow them up.

Replays

I also streamlined the replay system (which was already very efficient) to fit ~20% more recording time into the GBAs limited memory. Right now I'm using a 10K buffer but this will probably increase to 15-20K in the finished code, which would allow twice the recording time.

Note that the game gets better compression when not much is going on. Theoretically, this means that you could fit over 14 hours recording time in the current 10K buffer - your batteries would probably go flat before the buffer was full!

Next month

The focus for the next month will be on fixing bugs and adding save game support. I've also been working on the specially designed video codec that will be used to compress the intro. So far it's going really well, and gets compression ratios comparable to MPEG. More details next month.

Please feel free to email us with any questions, suggestions or enquiries. We do not yet have a publisher for the GBA version of Payback - please email us at queries@apex-designs.net if you're interested in publishing the game. For general information about Payback, please click here.