MikeMika

TTASR: 3 hours! A new record! TTASR = Time to Activision Sunset Request, Quohog! You now have a job to do. And great idea, @KevinMos3! That mock up looks great!

I've been testing it with some pretty funky keyboard controllers and the PC keyboard, so I've had some pretty shameful low scoring games. But I just cracked open a brand new factory sealed set of official Atari Keyboard Controllers and WOW. First game I got 444! This plays so great, and like Andrew said - This would have passed as an Activision game back in the day. From the personality to the cool sounds. I love the pacing and the difficulty adjusting after failures, too. This definitely gives that same zen/rush that Kaboom! provides, which feels rare to me. If you have two keyboard controllers, this is by far the best way to play. Slot them into one another and have some fun. Also, I liked it so much I starting trying to make a custom Atari cartridge shell in Tinker Cad for anyone with a 3D Printer. I know, it prevents it from stacking or slotting into a cartridge holder. Great work, Quohog!

If any of you guys are ever in the bay area, feel free to drop me a line and set up a visit to check it out.

Hey! JUST SAW THIS! We coded it in C++ using our internal studio library. We have a cheap little windows box inside. The power up and power down was never cleanly solved, although now we are porting the game to Raspberry PI4 to solve it once and for all. We're huge fans of Medieval Mayhem. HUGE fans. Did I mention big fans? It's always on the ready in the office. The biggest trouble for me was figuring out how to maintain the balance of power and fairness with six players. You really need to have that broadside battle that is at the heart of the game, so a lot of math and iteration went into solving that. The shapes of the bases were the result of all that work. THEN the physics were a pain. I leaned on my fellow engineer, Ian Sherman, to help there. Reflection with so many angles was a lot harder to deal with, because you get really weird shapes in the bricks and you could get bizarre reflection traps. So many little htings like that could fill an entire episode, but it would probably put most people in the audience to sleep (Save for people like all of us).

"Gentle nudge after 14 years" Mini, if I get that book done, it will be dedicated to you and I would have to put you on the cover. Sorry for the long wait and thanks for the (Albeit, awesome) reminder. Best - Mike

Oh man... I haven't been here in a bit and I miss out on this! Looks great, Salem! Lemmeno if you produce anymore.

I love that idea. We discovered that some trailers without doors could be entered. A simple human error. It Would be cool to add hidden teleporters in those trailers.

Definitely. At the end of the day, we needed to service the contest and that worked out well. Now we need to find the right time to make it a real game. I'm torn because both Kevin and I loved the experience, but would probably prefer making a new game from scratch. But since we are so close, it's tough to move on - people genuinely want it to evolve. Ugh. And then there is the pesky day job which turns into all consuming work. Which, BTW, we play Medieval Mayhem at the office at least three times a week.

... also, we were using an iPhone and the CuttleCart to check it on hardware, on a TV that made everything seem sort of fine. Only later after the first carts came in did we notice more issues. We joked about it, maybe to comfort ourselves.. "We're basically like a DataAge game, not as good as Activision or Imagic, but definitely not a Mythicon game!" Tears....

Ha! Oh no, someone posted about it! Yeah, we were trying to make it and ship games at our day job, so it was very little time. We were wary of anyone bringing it up on AtariAge, actually. Not until we managed to fix it up. We view the current version as the "contest version". We worked by priority until hours before launch. Thomas nailed the feature set that remains: - randomize distribution of the puzzle pieces, burgers and floppies (maybe by following a certain pattern to avoid too much randomness. ** We planned on doing this but could not get to it. Weighing the bug testing versus time made us drop it. In reality, we were tagging rooms as "puzzle potential" and it would pick from like 20 of them. The idea was to be a little bit like Impossible Mission. - randomize the enemy movements (currently they all follow one single pattern each, more patterns would sure help) ** Agreed. The interiors went in last, and the enemies did not get the variety they really needed. They also have display problems - Sprite corruption when you are on the right hand side of the enemies, timing issues when entering and exiting, and some other issues. - add several stages (e.g. start with a smaller maze and increase after you beat the previous stage, add more speed and randomness at higher levels ** We originally had three stages, small , medium, large. The you could play front to back, or select the stage 1, 2, or 3. The only way to get the secret would be to complete and unveil the hidden message on level 3. An homage of sorts. - currently you can only jump over things, maybe add flying objects you have to duck ** I have the ducking sprites and planned to include it, with Dragonfire-like enemies planned. We just didn't get to it. - more and different enemies (discover them stage by stage, maybe mix them) ** I have a large variety of enemies planned, just didn't get to them. Some of them required specific timing, others were more reflex. They were all pretty abstract. I initially based them on Keystone Kapers. - maybe add a timer that runs down to force the player to hurry ** Originally, I planned on the score being a timer. For the contest, the game was really hard. So we made it a score that serves no real purpose. - less extra lives (burgers) ** Because of the challenge more casual playesr were encountering, we overused the burgers. - add some more sound ** Like my day job, audio got neglected until it was almost too late. I was literally looking at a text file (Slocum's) on my iphone and telling Kevin to "just try this value" over his shoulder. Other notes: 1. Fix all the timing issues... there are a lot. 2. Add black "holes" ala pitfall where the ladders are. 3. Fix display timing.. Those ladders were driving me crazy... I have a different plan for that that fell through, more to do with the platyfield than using missiles. 4. Add some musical stabs. 5. Require a certain score to unlock the master secret, OR go back to a timer. 6. The title screen was supposed to descend to the player on teh ground and you'd start outside of the stacks. Maybe return to that. 7. Optimize the code. It's so sloppy and hacked. I barely looked at the 6502 inst. set, I just tried to code it by memory... not smart. I misued insyructions, did things the long way, and forgot all the old tricks. It's code bloat of the worst kind. Anyhow, glad some people thought it was amusing.. It needs a lot of work. It was really fun to make, and I'm happy with the results in the short time we had. I could not have done it without Thomas' code samples, the programming forums here (Humbling), and Slocum's info. We couldn't talk about it, obviously, because it was related to a contest. So I couldn't actually engage folks here, which would have been the ideal way to make the game. Best, Mike

Count me in for a CIB!

... and say goodbye to the project when people start receiving cease and desist letters. Not that I'm a pessimist of course. Hehe.. Trust me, I am familiar with the cease and decist in my career. These guys no longer work for Lucas. I do understand the sensitivity here, but these guys endorse the Zak sequel being done in Germany, etc. The only thing that would happen here is that they would likely join up on Atari Age and encourage it. Now, if Lucas LEGAL even had a hint, yeah.. They are ruthless. They've lightened up in the last couple years, allowing fan-made things, but don't try selling anything. They have started a Heritage group within the organization, which did the Monkey Island re-make. The people in that division are fantastic. They're very supportive of homebrew efforts, and see it as a great fan service. But you never know. It's always healthy to be pessimistic. Even though this is a public forum, I'll respect this group and keep a lid on it.

I also wanted to add to the list of compliments. This game is looking amazing. I hope you get enough time to make some progress. I'm working with some of the founding alumni of Lucasfilm Games right now, and I plan to show them the progress you've made if you haven't already shared it with them. This is the sort of thing that will blow them away. It represents everything they themselves set out to do when they formed Lucasfilm Games - Blow past the limitations of the machine and create groundbreaking experiences. Well done.

Thanks for checking, Al. I got all excited a while ago after seeing Man Goes Down (I think that's the game) - it was slick and got me inspired, so I started fixing up Kickman finally. I wanted to get the Pac-Man balloons in, but I got slogged down in re-writing the kernal. I'll give another look this weekend. I've probably consolidated drives and machines a few times since then. Just gotta get the search engine rolling. I need to find it to convince myself I'm not crazy. Last look was fruitful! I did find my Gunsmoke GBC rom (Digital Eclipse/Capcom), my Euro Klax Rom (2600 Adventure hidden in it and a proposal to my wife , and some other odd bits and bobs. I think I also found the prototype Atari ST Ballblazer that Tim Mensch and Dan Filner did for LucasArts. That's a keeper! I need to dig more often! Mike

@stephana: Yeah, it wasn't cleaned up at all on my part. Stella works great, it's just the way I assembled this version of the ROM. I'm trying to find a later version because a lot of that was fixed.