Taking the code less travelled!

Posted on 06-March-2026 by Kodiak

As Parallaxian nears completion and playtesters are now starting to send feedback, I thought I should share a video (below) of the latest WIP build of the technical testbed, this time showcasing planet Alpinia for a change of scenery from all that desert landscaping of previous previews.

The game's ground attack weapon, the A-TAC, is now functional and can lay down heavy fire on enemy ground positions, installations, vehicles, etc.

The handling of the game has been rewritten for the umpteenth time to simulate analogue inputs using the digital joysticks that the C64 is used to, so that duration of stick inputs matters too, and not just simply decoding directions the stick is pushed in.

That arrangement is coupled with feedback loops to simulate appropriate flight responses, with the plane essentially having seamless transitions between three integrated flight regimes, as follows:

1. Low speed handling, for VTOL, approaches, etc.
2. High speed handling.
3. Dogfighting.

Some technical notes (for those who care about such things):

1. The landscape is composed of MCM, ECBM (scroll layers 2 + 3 ) and hi-res gfx for this planet, and the panel zone is 100% ECBM with some plexed sprites.
2. For this planet, the mountains are derived from an 8-bit digitalisation of a photograph of a real world mountain range.
3. The game now uses only 4 raster IRQs, with most of the interrupt work being performed by the NMI. There are two main reasons for this, i.e., the game has only a small number of long interrupt-only tasks and these are generally assigned to the IRQ, and the NMI allows near cycle-exact granularity, whereas IRQs are on a line-only basis (unless you waste NOPs by shunting their trigger points along a scanline).
4. The HK's bullets and jet flames are the same sprite; likewise, the Figment's burners and laser / A-TAC are just one sprite, but everything is moved so fast it looks like multiple sprites are in use. This is a more refined version of my much-maligned "toggleplex" concept.
5. Until I start switching over to developing the game with GMOD4 in mind, the I/O space under $D000-$DFFF is now used for code, including subroutines called by the main loop. This is achievable by ensuring that the state of $01 is stored by each interrupt service routine (ISR) when one is triggered and then it is restored at the exit of each ISR.

(NOTE: The video misses some frames due to compression for web use, but you should still get a feel for the quality of the game; there are some minor visual glitches but I see no point in fixing them until all in-game features have been added; coders will understand what I am talking about!)

Posted on 22-December-2025 by Kodiak

Parallaxian WIP Update December 2025

This is just a very brief update on the state of Parallaxian, a "next generation" game in development for the Commodore 64, on which I have been working pretty much full-time for most of 2025, six days most weeks, morning to night.

An advanced playable demo has been distributed to a tiny handful of trusted confidantes and I am awaiting their feedback, but in the meantime I can say that all of the game's major coding challenges have been completed and all the new planets have been either designed or started; again, I am keeping most of this new material "classified" because of December 2024's unsanctioned leak.

And to reiterate again, the game can now only appear in cartridge form, for use with real hardware; there will be no digital release, because (a) too many people just gave Seawolves away to their mates (way to go in supporting game development, fellas) and (b) sales of Seawolves digital release were dismal, despite the good reviews the game received - but see point (a).

Parallaxian Gameplay Summary

Far from being yet another clichéd Defender clone, Parallaxian features gameplay that is rare or largely novel to the C64, as follows:

• Adrenaline-charged dogfight sequences with belligerent, "smart" drones; currently there are 4 grades of Hunter Killer drone, each with its own unique AI and tactics, each increasingly nastier than its predecessor. I really loved the NMEYE enemy in Dropzone and thought far more of the game should have been built around the exhilarating dogfights with it, so now finally such gameplay is possible with Parallaxian.
• Rescuing stranded colonists... but this is not the simple pick-up and drop-off dynamics of Dropzone; rather, part of it entails ferrying engineers to satellite dishes to repair them or finding the undercover injured marine on each planet so that he donates his assault weapon to the pilot.
• Collecting mineral samples from each planet, running the gauntlet of attacks from "zomboids", etc.
• Destroying ground forces arrayed against you and evading terrifying SAMs.

You can check out some of the gameplay below; note that the Hunter Killer drones become much more aggressive and lethal the more of them you shoot down in each planet:

The audio in the above embedded video somehow ended up lagging the visuals (sorry about that!) and note that there are some obvious minor gfx and coding glitches indirectly caused by my careless impatience to get a video online - again, sorry about that!

I really need to improve low speed inertia / momentum effects to make the low speed handling feel more natural and then the A-TAC weapon and ground forces / enemy defensive weapons have to be added.

After that it's really just a matter of adding more SFX, planets and what John Rowlands used to call "presentation" (title screens, etc.)

2025 was consumed with rewriting huge chunks of the game code for the umpteenth time but I think the hardest work is all behind me.

Other news #1: Seawolves Redux - a Cartridge Release

I hope to release a cartridge edition of Seawolves with some extra new features and a new gameplay mode (provisionally called "basketcase mode"), whereupon the digital version would no longer be offered for sale.

Draft new features:

• High score saver.
• Title screen music.
• Additional "basketcase" gameplay mode.
• Paddle support.
• Keyboard support.
• Extra warship types.
• Slightly easier gameplay.
• Interlude mini game.
• 1-2 new scenes.

Other news #2: Football Game Concept

Just for fun one evening when I was burned out with Parallaxian, I produced some concept design for a potential new football game for the C64.

The little footballers would each have two sprites assigned to them (as is the case with Microprose Soccer), so that more complicated kits such as those worn by Barcelona, Atletico Madrid, Crystal Palace, Hamburger SV, et al, could be rendered by the multiplexor.

A difficulty I noted is, of course, the green clubs, such as Celtic, Werder Bremen, Panathinaikos, Hibernian, Real Betis, et al.

For now, it's only GFX swatches to test what might work, but it should be do-able with a decent multiplexor system and side-to-side scrolling.

Posted on 22-July-2025 by Kodiak

There are now two new^* technical articles uploaded for coders to look at.

The first one is 9 Exotic Coding Tricks used in the C64 Game, Seawolves and covers some of the perhaps unusual technical features that make the game possible.

The second article is one I had been planning on writing for several years but just never got round to until recently.

It is How to Set Up and Use NMIs On the Commodore 64 and fills (I hope!) a gap in the C64 coding scene's documentation on the subject, since it is a very badly explained^** and, perhaps consequently, generally ignored topic.

(* The first article, albeit in a lesser form, was previously released on my website last year before it went down with my old web host, but this is a new version of it with extra content).

(** If you want a compendium of atrociously explained, assumption-laden and poorly laid-out coding articles, check out most of the materials on Codebase64).

Posted on 09-July-2025 by Kodiak

I have often wondered about the true level of digital download sales for commercial games on the Commodore 64 in the scene’s present middle-aged consumer market, and if you are an aspiring C64 games developer, you might very well be wondering the same.

Of course, when I say “middle-aged”, there is a subtle inference or subtext suggesting that, in theory at least, these are not penniless teenagers who must resort to piracy to get their hands on the latest “wares”.

No, I am presuming that most of them have had their financial “ducks in a row” for a long time by now and can therefore afford to indulge in a bit of retro nostalgia.

And sure, I know that statistically there must be some old sceners who are broke, but one tends to (or likes to) imagine that such are merely outliers unrepresentative of the scene as a whole.

So with that sweeping assumption laid down right at the start, I come to disclose and review the sales figures for my first ever new Commodore 64 game release, Seawolves, which was unleashed in March 2024, albeit only in a digital format.

Would you like to hazard a guess?

What would you think the sales levels would be of a very positively reviewed game that took approximately 15 months to develop, using some pretty exotic coding tricks and endless play testing and fine-tuning?

400 copies?

300?

200?

All wrong.

Try just over one hundred sales in the space of 15 months.

Yes, you read that right.

The customer list is just over 110, with the greater bulk of them loaded into the first 3-4 months.

Early Promotional Efforts + Buyer Demographics

I used my YouTube channel to spread the news, as well as my own website (before my appalling web host, tsohost, vanished from the face of the earth and took kodiak64.com with it).

Favourable reviews quickly followed from Retro Gamer Nation and BastichB (although he omitted it from his list of top 10 games for 2024), and it was on the crest of the ensuing waves that most of my sales came.

By far, most of the sales came from Germany, followed by the UK.

Understandably, very few in the US bought the game, given that it is PAL-only.

Why No itch.io Presence?

I made a conscious decision not to use itch.io to sell the game because, as a matter of principle, I did not and still do not agree with their sign-up terms.

Some have decried that as a mistake that has harmed my sales, and it may indeed be true that it has hampered sales, but not as much as piracy has.

Instead I have confined sales to my own platform which, as alluded to earlier, was offline for a period – I think 2-3 months – in the aftermath of my web host debacle, and during that period two or three people privately asked to buy the game.

In all, I estimate the game raised somewhere between £700 and £800 in sales (as some very generous people paid far more than the asking price), so one would be clinically insane to imagine it was a success.

In fact, I would say that unless I release the proposed enhanced cartridge version of the game, it has been a grade A waste of effort.

Lessons for Parallaxian

In many respects I saw Seawolves as a pathfinder for the planned Parallaxian release.

It helped me refine my own concept of what makes a game playable and addictive, shifting my natural focus on impressive effects away to gameplay instead, although I now insist that both are equally important, as opposed to my previous fixation on emphasising effects.

I also was keen to see how my enemies in the scene would react, but they largely ignored Seawolves, possibly due to the effusive praise the game was receiving.

That said, I knew they would not forget Parallaxian, as the December fiasco proved when it smoked out you-know-who.

One of the biggest lessons, however, that Seawolves taught me was the folly of digital releases.

Since the well-heeled middle aged scene (as I imagine it to be at least!) is still acting like spotty teenagers freely pirating digital content, the only path open to me for releasing Parallaxian is cartridge, and yes, I have asserted this before, but here I will do so again: there will NEVER be a digital release of Parallaxian, so if anyone wants to play it, they will have to use real hardware or else have access to a buyer of the cartridge willing and able to illegally copy it into a digital format.

Closing Thoughts

Overall then, my experience with developing Seawolves has been demoralising and demotivating to say the least, but was not entirely unexpected.

I am still working hard on Parallaxian and if it gets finished, boy oh boy, what a game it will be!

But it will also be my last attempt at any kind of “AAA” game on the C64, which means I am saying Deep Winter is hereby formally cancelled... To be fair, the total lack of encouraging feedback from those I sent early tech demos to had already decided that anyway.

Nevertheless, I would like to think I will carry on coding to keep my brain sharp even after Parallaxian, but only on minor projects, such as the planned Seawolves II game.

As for professional game development on the C64, I would strongly counsel anyone thinking about it to look for something far more productive instead and just let the shovelware keep on flowing to feed to the crackers until the scene finally peters out.

But that’s just my opinion, obviously.

Kodiak.

Posted on 02-June-2025 by Kodiak

Parallaxian WIP Update June 2025

This is a redacted WIP update as I do not want anyone outside my trusted circle of C64 scene contacts to know the real extent of progress on Parallaxian at this stage.

Accordingly, all I want to disclose for now are some design updates to the main sprite to freshen it up in the wake of the disgraceful and unauthorised release on CSDB of an old, stale tech demo in December.

The original 1995 design was composed of two multicolour sprites but in 2018 I updated that to the design everyone has been used to in my WIP coverage on this website and on YouTube; that design was made up of a hi-res silhouette for the main fuselage and tail, with a multicolour sprite for the cockpit and nose section.

The 2018 version very much retained the 1990s vibe of the original design, which was obviously inspired by the gorgeous curves of the two-seater variants of the Russian Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker series of fighter jets entering service in the Russian air force at that time.

Sharp readers might also notice that the name "Figment" follows the NATO tradition of assigning reporting names starting with the letter "F" for Russian fighter aircraft, not that I intend the plane in Parallaxian to be at all Russian!

Below are some new design iterations developed over the past few weeks, mostly done when I was too tired to code.

Let me know your thoughts

Of the 4th-gen designs, my personal favourite is the third one and at the moment I am torn between using it and one of the latter two stealth variants in the finished game, but I would welcome feedback from my readers by email (jon 'at' kodiak64.co.uk) on what you think is the best design.

Other progress...

I have spent most of the past 4-5 weeks on two new planet designs, one of which features extensive use of ECBM graphics and the other with some bitmap.

Both of these new planets display a slightly altered perspective; the first one also has some interesting special backdrops that would certainly catch the eye!

However, as I trust you understand, I am being very protective of the game in the wake of the December debacle and the attacks made against it by its original hater, so please be patient with me as I continue this marathon project.