Blood Money

So Ive been looking at the code to Blood Money whilst I've been writing this post-mortem, and its not quite the work of art I thought it was; which I guess is no surprise. I was only 19 at the time and I hope I've improved a lot since then! However one thing I did get totally wrong was the way the paths were created.

In XeO3 I have 10 paths, one for each baddie and another which acts as the master path. This is how I remembered I'd done Blood Money, but it turns out I was wrong. In Blood Money, I'd a special format for the master path, one that didn't look at all like the rest of the system.

Path_Address:
Sc0:
 db  End_of_Screen
 db 5|Sprite,$58,100,14|Sig,<path2,>path2,<Header2,>Header2
 db 7|Sprite,$58,100,14|Sig,<path2,>path2,<Header2,>Header2
 db 9|Sprite,$58,100,14|Sig,<path2,>path2,<Header2,>Header2
 db 10|Sprite,$58,150,3|Sig,<path1,>path1,<Header2,>Header2
 db 11|Sprite,$58,100,14|Sig,<path2,>path2,<Header2,>Header2
 db 12|Sprite,$58,150,3|Sig,<path1,>path1,<Header2,>Header2
 db 14|Sprite,$58,150,3|Sig,<path1,>path1,<Header2,>Header2
 db 16|Sprite,$58,150,3|Sig,<path1,>path1,<Header2,>Header2
 db 18|Gun,$27,17,Player2 | Gup
 db 24|Gun,$27,1,player1 | Gdown
 db 35|Sprite,$58,150,14|Sig,<path4,>path4,<Header4,>Header4
 db 35|Sprite,$58+24,150,14|Sig,<path4,>path4,<Header5,>Header5
 db 35|Sprite,$58,150+21,14|Sig,<path4,>path4,<Header6,>Header6
 db 35|Sprite,$58+24,150+21,14|Sig,<path4,>path4,<Header7,>Header7

This is the 1st screen from Level 1(I think) on Blood Money, and its pretty ugly. The 1st byte is the character to start the sprite on followed by the X,Y, Path and object header. It was also able to spawn turrets and character sprites but still - it was pretty nasty.

In XeO3 I use the path engine as the master path, that way I can use loops and pause whenever I need to, and then use standard StartSprite commands. I did a couple of Shoot-em-ups for mobile phones, and I used the XeO3 way then, so I must have just gotten confused. Still I guess its good to know that I do still improve, even with the most basic of game.