Attract mode?

[gabriele1969]

Is it possible to have some sort of attract mode (the game plays while waiting for the player to press start)? I tried to get something like that in one of my games but was only able to show one screen with the main character sprite (that image with another sprite code, pressing fire would start the game)... not really an attract mode..
Ideally it would be great if we could have a piece of a rzx with an actual game showing while waiting for the player to press start..

[andrewvanbeck]

Like Manic Miners screen tour?

I think that would be possible - I would forget having the main player sprite shown though, just the screens with enemies moving about. The key would be having a variable that specifies if the game is playing or not, then in the player event you can have a check for that variable and swap out the player sprite for a blank image, or have a blank sprite that is used to spawn the player if the game is in session, otherwise the special spawner sprite could take on the logic of incrementing the screen, checking for game start, calculating the delay etc.

Like if you have a blank sprite image and a free event, maybe each screen just has a that sprite at the player start position, and say you use the variable G to specify if the game is on:

IF G 1
SPAWN 0 0
REMOVE
EXIT
ENDIF

So if G is 1, then the player sprite is created and the spawner sprite removed, because it doesn't need to do anything else. The player sprite just won't be shown anywhere if the game isn't on, so it wouldn't even have the little single flame flash that we sometimes get, because the spawner sprite image would be blank.

IF G 0
ADD 1 TO PARAMA
IF PARAMA 0
NEXTSCREEN
ENDIF
LET LINE 0
LET COLUMN 0
MESSAGE 1
ENDIF

So if G is 0, then increment the PARAMA variable, and if it hits 0 (about 5 seconds) the screen advances to the next. Message 1 might just be 'Press fire to start'.

IF KEY 4
LET G 1
LET SCREEN 0
RESTART
EXIT
ENDIF

Then that to set G to 1 and restart the game, and the next time the event is called it'll spawn the player instead of showing screens. This would let you add effects for the player start, heck you could even use the spawner sprite and a bank of sound effects to play some music while showing the screens.

[gabriele1969]

thanks i will try that