Aaron
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Posts posted by Aaron
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Looks / plays great! Are you calling this one a release candidate or do you still have a tweaking or two to do?
I've been calling them release candidates for a while now...
I formatted the manual to 40 column width for use on a CC2, BTW.
Cool.
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It seems I have at least one more release.
This one adds an EZ (easy, get it?) game mode that restores the old AI behavior, where it doesn't move while falling. Also the gravity in the PAL version should be on par with the NTSC one now, but since it's not exactly the same I've thrown in a PAL60 version as well. For people on [stella], this is the same version I posted a couple days ago.
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Being the author of one of the many other "going down" type games, I guess I'll have to say something....
It seems like a decent concept. You might run into problems trying to put a player, 2 enemies, and bullets all on the same level though... There are plenty of ways to make it work, just do make sure you know what you're getting into.
I assume you'll have it scroll or something once Phred finishes the bottom level? Otherwise it seems like it'd be over pretty fast...
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3. Maybe you could add some (optional?) random element to the fights. Currently it's IMO a bit too mathematical. E.g. you could increase or decrease the defense/assault rating by up to +/-1/8th.
I have a personal peeve against strategy games with random elements in the combat. Did you every play a game of Risk against the computer and have 20 armies defending Australia, and watch the computer blast through them with his 5 armies because he got a series of lucky dice rolls? Grrrrrrrr.
At the absolute most, I may add a random +1 bump on combat rating per stardate, and see how that affects the game.I'll agree that too much randomness is annoying, but I tend to think battles between fleets of equal size should have a chance of going either way. The random +1 bump would probably work...... though maybe you could base the probability of it on some condition. Fighting on your home world could get a better chance, for example.
Regarding all the other suggestions for War of the Worlds, they are interesting, but remember this is a 4K ROM with only 128 bytes of RAM to spare. If I attach any new attributes to the ships, that's an extra 16 RAM bytes consumed, which is one eighth of my total RAM! (8 bytes for the ships on each world, plus 8 bytes for each of the fleet slots.)
You could do extra attributes just for each home world, or you could make the first fleet special somehow and give it more attributes... I can't think of a good justification for that right now though.
You could also use a byte or two to pick a random world and give it some special property, e.g. "there be dragons here".
Of course I'm well aware that very little of this would fit in 400 bytes of rom...
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I think it's just weird how the ship disappears when you fire...but besides that and the flicker and how amazing Stargate looks (like an NES game, really), it's great.
Well ok, it does flicker rather crazily... gave me headaches as a kid.
But the ship disappearing is the best part of the game! See, you're invulnerable for split second while firing, so it's a valid strategy to go on an insane rampage and shoot up the whole place.
In Stargate you actually have to think about what you're doing... maybe that's better, but it's not as fun. -
Hey, I really like this.
There's more strategy involved than would be apparent at first glance. Aside from what's been said already though, I don't have too many suggestions, besides the obvious things that would eat up more rom space...Also, nice manual - It's the history erase button! What's it do? Maybe something good, maybe something bad... I guess we'll never know.
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the question I have, is would it be better to take an old-school arcade game with a really crappy VCS port (or no VCS port) and make a version for the system? or would it work if i just started on a pretty ambitious project of my own creation?
Personally I'd much rather see something totally original, but I'm really a weirdo... people generally seem to go for stuff with more name recognition. So I don't know... if you can think of a good, original (and simple! - this is your first one, remember?) project, I say do it. Just keep in mind that most people who take my advice wind up living in a cardboard box.
...and how bad the port of Defender is...
And while I'm ranting, what's up with people not liking Defender? It's one of my favorite VCS games
. Sure, it's nothing like the arcade, but why can't it be good game in it's own right? -
What does everyone else think of the AI?
The first time I played it hit me on the first shot a couple times in a row, which was rather annoying...... I think that was just bad luck on my part though as it hasn't done that in a while.
But based on that experience, I'd say you probably shouldn't make it any more accurate, if that's what you were planning. I don't know if you've given the AI any memory or not... but if you could make it more difficult, it would IMO be better to introduce the extra difficulty gradually after every shot.
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If you would'nt mind, I could give it a shot and see what turns out.
Eh, sure, go ahead. I posted the source to [stella], if you're on there. Otherwise I can send you a copy.
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This would work into a great Joust Universe game. The power-ups could be the eggs and the player bumping is already in the game. The only thing I see that would have to be added is one more frame of animation for the bird gliding to the next level. Maybe even have a boss level with the winning player going against the Joust Pterodactyl.Joust Tournament would be a good title.
Nice pics
I actually did have a Joust mode in an early version... it wasn't a whole lot of fun though, since it's extremely easy to land on the other guy's head.
The game mechanics would have to be changed a bit for it to work... and there isn't room, you know? -
Well... I only tried it in Z26, but occasionally the top of the guy's head turns brown when you jump. Otherwise it seems fine.
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Aaron, I'm really liking Falldown - very playable. I also like the fact that despite our games being so similar in concept, they are both quite different.
Thanks
You really went a whole other direction with the skateboard and the helicopter and all. I'm hoping to see more of course. Anyway, I did find a couple minor things to work on in Fall Down...
Firstly the game was only showing 191 visible lines, but I had an extra line of overscan, so now it displays 192. Also the code that checked when platforms were captured always checked player 1 first, which gave a (very) slight advantage. So now I have it alternating between them.
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Just got through trying it out on the Cuttle Cart 2 and 7800. Pause switch works!
Awesome, thanks!
I really don't understand what the difficulty swithes do .. I'll play around with it this weekend.
I'm sure you've figured it out by now if you've been playing around with it, but for anyone else...... the left switch determines whether player 1 wraps around (amateur) or bounces off (pro) the edges. The right switch does the same thing for player 2.
Anyway, I have a second release candidate with some tweaks and bug fixes.........
The scrolling starts out a little faster in the PAL version.
Fixed an extra gray line that was running into the score.
Fixed it so you can't exchange places with dead players.
The white backgrounds are a shade darker.
You can collect four power-ups in one-player mode now - this allows a
teleport to the bottom of the screen (same effect as a respawn).
Collecting a fifth power-up now wraps back to one, instead of zero.
Pressing select pauses the game. The old B&W/Color stuff is still there though.
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Well, since you asked for some feedback, here we go.... :wink:
Graphically it's pretty simple, but very clean. Good job there.
The terrain generator seems pretty good too. Random, but no really jagged edges.
My only really major complaint is that there's no visible indicator of your firing angle. A single point that circled around the tank would be good enough... I don't think it would be that hard (space allowing), since you must already have a trig table in there somewhere, right?
Also, why is the 'A'ngle represented by an 'E'?
If there's room, a nice beefy explosion noise would be nice too
One thing you will want to keep in mind is that the left and right difficulty switches, in combination, select the terrain roughness in the game - so if you play it on an emulator, all you will get is flat terrain initially until you change the difficulty switches.
So... why not make the rougher terrain the default?
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It's time for yet another update. I'm calling this one a release candidate, because I'm totally out of space to add stuff now (seriously, I mean it this time
).So, the new stuff:
Improved AI. It uses the wrap-around edges intelligently if they're turned on - I don't think I ever mentioned it, but that's what the difficulty switches do.
When using the speed-up power-ups, your acceleration increases now as well.
The game goes into "attract mode" with just the AI playing, if left on the title screen for a while. With the new AI code it can score around 90 most times, which is pretty good I think.
Cycling the B&W/Color switch will pause the game. This should work with the 7800's pause button too, I guess... Maybe someone could try it?
Proper VSYNC code - previous versions had a bunch of code executing in the VSYNC area instead of the standard 3 WSYNCs. I managed to fit the code into overscan in this version, though some of the game logic is now only done on alternating frames. Anyone who can tell the difference can have a cookie
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Well, if you want a dungeon crawl, nothing really beats Linley's Dungeon Crawl. Somewhat similar to NetHack, but much more fun IMO. I'm in the middle of a game right now...
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I don't think it would matter unless everyone was using non-atari brand sticks because you have to push hard to make them work anyways.
I hadn't thought of that (been spoiled by the 7800 pad), but you might be right... Would it better to have fire jump and up (or down?) use the power-ups? Or maybe there could be an alternate control switch? I'm not sure how I'd implement that though...
Anyway... I decided to do another round of optimization, and ended up saving a good bit of space and even a byte of ram
. So there'll be at least one more version with some nice improvements. -
I never knew you wrote The Prison! Here's a bug report. If you view the brick info menu while the Level dialog is up, and exit the brick info menu, the level dialog will still be there when you launch the ball.Ack, you're right. I'll have to do an update now....
Thanks :wink:
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Well, I have a small update today. Mainly I've just done some more touching up on various things... the backgrounds are a little darker, the score sound effect is a little quieter, etc.
Also I changed the title screen to show the scores from the most recent game.
And that's about it... maybe this will be the final version
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Aaron - Hi, I've done tons of PC dev and a little GBA dev, and I'm looking to get into Palm dev. What is a good, free dev tool? I prefer coding in C/C++
There's a version of GCC that targets Palm - take a look at PRC-Tools.
PalmSource also just released the Palm OS Developer Suite, which afaik includes PRC-Tools. I haven't tried it though, since it's a HUGE download and reportedly only works on WinXP (I have 98). But, take a look at their developer page anyway.
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I actually write games for Palm OS - you can check out my work at http://www.mobilegamelab.com. I have a freeware breakout clone that everyone seems to like...
Also, I heartily recommend Rougelikes for PalmOS.
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Well, time for an update...
The biggest thing in this version is a new (totally unoriginal
) game mode where the background color changes to make one of the players invisible. I'm not sure how fun it'll be, but it was easy to add I've also been polishing up various things. The colors fade in and out between stages now, there are some more sound effects, and a few bugs got fixed, including the feet-disappearing thing
Also I built a separate PAL version. I wanted to have it switchable in-game, but there wasn't room as usual...
How about something that blocks the other guy? Either it puts a block in his path that he has to jump over, or it closes up the hole that he's nearest to? (There'd have to be some provision so it could only do that on the nearest level that had more than one hole in it.)
I've been playing around with something like this, but it seems a little too easy to exploit... so I've just left the power-ups the way they were for now.
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Anyway, thought of one more thing - it'd be nice to come down quicker when jumping. It seems a bit floaty right now, and makes jumping in faster levels impossible.
To do that I'd have to increase the gravity for the entire game, but I think it's pretty good where it is right now for falling through the holes. You might notice though that the jump height is proportional to how long you press up, so you can just tap up for a small jump. I could maybe change the sensitivity on this if you think it would help?
how do you tell the power-ups apart? ie, what is a digging power-up vs. other types.
The system is borrowed from the shoot 'em up world - all the power-ups are the same, but what happens is determined by how many you have. So for example if you have 1 and press fire, you get a minor speed boost, but you get a better speed boost with 3.
(Personally I'd rather have something more interesting for level 3, so if anyone has suggestions...)
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Another week, another version of Fall Down...
Most of the time I spent on this version was for optimization - I ended up saving a couple hundred bytes, which promptly got used up again.
Anyway, new features...
Better character animation. It still sucks, but erm, less so - now the guys don't animate while the controls are inactive. Personally I didn't like the Dragon Warrior look
New gameplay rules. Now players respawn after they die, so if you screw up it gives the other guy a few lines, but not the whole game.
A mode where the players bounce off each other. I had a lot of fun playing against the AI in this mode, so I made it the default.
(A good trick is to jump and try to hit the other guy on the way up, so he goes flying off in the other direction) The old pass-by mode is marked with 2-way arrows on the title screen.Better AI. It tries to move while falling and shouldn't get stuck on ledges any more. It still doesn't go after power-ups or jump, but I think that's kind of hopeless...
Basic sound effects. Erm, such as they are... Anyone have any tips on creating good sound effects? I read the "Atari Music and Sound Programming Guide", but it seemed to be mainly about music...
Varying "stages". Every 8 or 16 platforms the background color will change, along with the hole-creation probabilities. I used this to create choke points in a few places, which livens things up a bit I think.
You could end the players turn when it touches the bottom of the screen as an extra difficulty so it won't show.
I eventually decided not to do this for a couple reasons - Alex's game already works that way, and the AI wouldn't be able to play it very well. So the feet-disappearing thing is still there. *shrug*
Anyway, development is nearing the end now, as I want to keep this under 4k, not to mention that I've used nearly all the available ram and processing time. Suggestions are still welcome though.
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Genesis Must-haves
in Classic Console Discussion
Posted
Most of these have been mentioned already...
Streets of Rage 2
Contra: Hard Corps
Thunder Force 3 & 4 (aka Lightning Force)
Shinobi 3
Gunstar Heroes
...and Zero Wing for pure comedic value