The robots now know if they'll hit you when they shoot. To visually show this, I change their shots from the homing missiles(squares) to the normal shots (lines). In the screen shot the top and bottom row robots have acquired target lock, the middle row robot has not.

 

The test them, I made it so that holding up on the right joystick (Y key in Stella) will cause the robots to shoot. Let go and the shots will reset. If you can line things up correctly, the robots will shoot other robots for you.

 

I did some playtesting in MAME and realized the shots in the arcade version move quite a bit faster than the home version. So I've doubled the speed for the humanoid shots. Robot shots are slow in the beginning and get faster later in the game, so I've done likewise. Their faster shots currently appear in the 6th room (the grey robots).

 

I made a change to how the shots are displayed. Originally shots 0 and 2 were always drawn using missile 0 and shots 1 and 3 were always drawn using missile 1. Now they alternate missiles so that their color will flicker. I did this as sometimes horizontal shots would be hard to see due to a dark color. By swapping missiles every other time, there's now a good chance that they'll be more visible.

 

Lastly I fixed it so that the humanoid will no longer stop "mid-stride".

 

ROM

frantic_harmony20110823.bin

 

Source

Frantic20110823.zip