Cocoa and the Time Machine - New MPAGD game

[Minilop]

Hi, I've just released my first game - Cocoa and the Time Machine


Aim

Cocoa's Time Machine has transported his burrow to 1452 AD, but he's used all his fuel in getting there.



He's on a mission to recover priceless artefacts for his collection. But is easily distracted by Parsley - his favourite food.



​So, find the artefacts, refuel the time machine, munch parsley, and get home in time for tea...



​
...if only it were that simple, his new timeline has recently suffered a pandemic, and panic buying has left the land short of many essentials. Parsley is in short supply so you'll need to ration it. Meanwhile, the King has a desperate problem...can Cocoa Help?



​QAOP Space to Jump
Available here: minilop.itch.io/cocoa-and-the-time-machine

[AndyJF]

I think the graphics are good and you've included some interesting game mechanics. The difficulty is about right, I like the use of a health meter rather than just lives. I like games that aren't too frustrating to play so that ticked another box for me. Great work!

[Minilop]

Thanks for the feedback Andy

[Packobilly]

Hi, Waverleys.
Not much to add. It is a fun and addictive game, really.
In my opinion it has a very well adjusted difficulty, which allows you to advance screens without many problems, although it is true that the matter becomes more complicated as you progress ...
Got to say that I am still trying to get the sword!! I am sure that I will get it.
Cheers!!

[Minilop]

Thanks Packobilly!

Hope you find all those artefacts and get Cocoa home for tea!

[Minilop]

I've just released a 128K version of Cocoa and the Time Machine, with in game music by Mike Richmond, couldn't have been possible without the incredible support of David Saphier and his AGD Musicizer v2.0 for MPAGD, downloadable via itch minilop.itch.io/cocoa-and-the-time-machine

[ultranarwhal]

Great you've got music now, where did you get AGD Musicizer v2.0 for MPAGD from though?

[Minilop]

David Saphier posted it on the Facebook group last night

[Minilop]

Via the power of MPAGD I have now ported Cocoa and the Time Machine to MSX. Due to memory restrictions I had to drop some of the sprites so there are less Enemy sprites and animation frames (although there are the same number of enemies overall) - the gameplay isn't changed, I just needed to save memory. There was very little code re-working required, there are good notes on the github page that will help anyone considering a port of a speccy game to MSX. I even managed to get one of the chiptunes in to the game as the MSX engine has built in support for music which is a nice touch, and AY sound FX too.

I needed to increase all of my JUMP parameters as the MSX version doesn't JUMP as high as speccy. Also there is no need to use SPRITEINK since you can control sprite colours via the Sprite Position editor.

The maximum ROM size that you can create a distribution for is 32K, but the engine will switch to a RAM (.dsk file) if your game is too large, for this it says 48K, however for me once I got to about 41K it wouldnt work, once I got the game down to about 40K it worked and created a dsk file which is now available on my itch.io page.

Huge thanks to jltursan for creating this engine, it would be fantastic if development on it could continue, if it could could support larger file sizes I could really do justice to the port and get all the original graphics and sprites back (and indeed take advantage of MSX's improved graphics capabilities!) also thanks to Richard Smit for helping test the port.