London, 1974. You are a famous Scotland Yard Detective who must solve the murder of the rich aristocrat Angus McFungus, who’s body has been discovered at his home at 427 Park Lane. Arriving at the residence you soon discover that this will not be a simple ‘open and shut’ case, and will take all your finely honed detective skills to solve. Can you put your finger on the killer?

This is a remake of the 1986 C64 game by Sam Monthorpe for the Nintendo DS. Charcters were created by Paul Jay and the plot was cunningly devised by the Magnificent Seven.

https://www.baker76.com/detective-ds

We've added a new character to the game who's a ghost that haunts the mansion. Just a new touch to the original game. There's also two extra locations not found in the original. Lobo did a great job on this and they are seamless. I don't want to give much more info about it because for those people who have completed the original game have an extra challenge.

The good thing about setting the global sprites to bitmap mode is you can use both tiled and bitmap sprites.

Anyway I've improved the collision map detection and general way the character moves. Mainly by using floating numbers and rounding (using round, floor or ceil as needed). It feels perfect (to me anyway) now, so I'm happy with the way that works. Now I have just added all the doors as attachments to the levels.

I'll attach a picture showing what I mean. Flash and I used the same technique for Warhawk and again in MMLL. This allows us to dmacopy the section of the map over the visible map to animate it. I've done a slightly different method to describe the location because unlike Warhawk each room can have different animated objects. I have described these objects in the colmap's. So each tile is given an id and during initialization the x,y and width height (aka RECT struct) of tiles with the same id can be calculated and thus animated as needed.

Oh and Flash came up with the idea of animating the clock in the clock room. I thought it was a great idea and gives me a chance to use the pixel drawing code from earlier. So yeah the clock will show the correct game time 🙂