SpiceWare's Blog

The animations are looking great. One small bug: the "DEMO" text seems to be corrupted now - probably just some alignment issue.

 

EDIT: I see that this has already been covered in the main forums.

 

Chris

I love the new extended animations. It looked like you took my advice about the dragon exhibiting some baseball pitcher-like gestures before he launches the fireball. It gives us a better opportunity to enjoy watching the dragon which is definitely going to go down as the most intricate sprite animation ever done on the VCS.

 

The last thing that would be nice regarding the dragon is to have him make a noise to announce himself when he comes on, kind of like a referee or something.

 

Although the music starts up well on the knight animation, it now cuts off abruptly instead of at the end of a phrase. If you have to do it that way, can you at least either ramp down the volume or cut out the melody after the end of the first riff and let it trail out only on percussion? Or you could cut off the music at the end of the phrase and use the extra time to do a kind of grandfather clock thing where you count off how many wins the leader has in flashes/explosions. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM in the same rhythm as the music. That would give it that whole over-the-top Medieval Times/Professional wrestling vibe.

 

It's probably too late for this, but I did notice a real lack of "english". When the ball hits the edge of your shield it doesn't ricochet off the way you'd expect. This was with a ball going straight up-down with my guy in the top left position. Even when I try to hit the ball while moving the shield I can't "bump" it the way you could in real-life like in air-hockey. Likewise if I am holding the ball, when I flick the paddle and release it as I'm moving, the ball doesn't maintain any of that momentum. If you stored a one-frame history of prior movement you would know on collision whether it's a "bump" or not and apply english accordingly. I think that would significantly improve the playability as it would help mix up the return trajectories and reward finesse. Totally realistic physics would result in the ball falling into bad infinite loops and slow shallow angles, so I realize you have to fake it, but I think the trajectory should be somehow colored by the movement of the paddle.

Waiting on my friends, so I thought I'd check the blog

 

I love the new extended animations. It looked like you took my advice about the dragon exhibiting some baseball pitcher-like gestures before he launches the fireball. It gives us a better opportunity to enjoy watching the dragon which is definitely going to go down as the most intricate sprite animation ever done on the VCS.

I think espire8 always planned the gestures, they're seen in his flash demo which was posted quite a while back. I had hoped to have them all coded last weekend, but his XP system crashed and I've been (im)patiently waiting while he reinstalled his system and software. I received most of the sequences yesterday afternoon and did the initial implementation. I need to do some fine-tuning of the playback speeds. I'm also still in need of the knight-chase-off and the easter egg sequences.

 

The delay turned out to be somewhat good, I doubt the shimmering knight animation would have happened without it.

 

The last thing that would be nice regarding the dragon is to have him make a noise to announce himself when he comes on, kind of like a referee or something.

A referee noise? I don't follow sports, so I don't know what that would sound like. The bank with the sound effects is also down to 0 bytes of free ROM.

 

Although the music starts up well on the knight animation, it now cuts off abruptly instead of at the end of a phrase. If you have to do it that way, can you at least either ramp down the volume or cut out the melody after the end of the first riff and let it trail out only on percussion? Or you could cut off the music at the end of the phrase and use the extra time to do a kind of grandfather clock thing where you count off how many wins the leader has in flashes/explosions. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM in the same rhythm as the music. That would give it that whole over-the-top Medieval Times/Professional wrestling vibe.

The abrupt cut off is on my list of final things to look at. I'm not that familiar with Paul's music routines(I just dropped in the routines with Erik Ehrling's music) but think I could figure out how to make it end at the end of a phrase. As for me attempting to figure it out and write new music with "booms" and all, that's not going to happen in the 1 day I have left.

 

 

It's probably too late for this, but I did notice a real lack of "english". When the ball hits the edge of your shield it doesn't ricochet off the way you'd expect. This was with a ball going straight up-down with my guy in the top left position. Even when I try to hit the ball while moving the shield I can't "bump" it the way you could in real-life like in air-hockey. Likewise if I am holding the ball, when I flick the paddle and release it as I'm moving, the ball doesn't maintain any of that momentum. If you stored a one-frame history of prior movement you would know on collision whether it's a "bump" or not and apply english accordingly. I think that would significantly improve the playability as it would help mix up the return trajectories and reward finesse. Totally realistic physics would result in the ball falling into bad infinite loops and slow shallow angles, so I realize you have to fake it, but I think the trajectory should be somehow colored by the movement of the paddle.

Yeah, to late. I tried different shield collision routines but kept rolling the screen due to lack of processing time. There's also 0 bytes of RAM left, so storing prior positions of anything is out of the question.

 

Thanks for your input!

A referee noise? I don't follow sports, so I don't know what that would sound like. The bank with the sound effects is also down to 0 bytes of free ROM.

 

In a basketball and football they use a whistle.