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Alien Inbound


GadgetUK

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Thx for feedback! Alien is simple game, the objective is to kill the alien before the TOOH timer reaches zero. The TOOH stands for Time Out Of Hypersleep, which basically is the period of time you have before you effectively arrive back at earth.

 

In order to kill the Alien your best chance is to explore the ship and find weapons and other useful items. Nearly all items except tracker can do additional dmg to the alien when attacking. The number of people attacking the alien improves hit chance and evasion chance and results in more damage. If the alien feels outnumbered it can flee. When fighting the Alien, damage in the local room will occur. If dmg in any room reaches 100% theres a hull breach and its game over.

 

The alien can cause fires (rarely) as it roams the ship, so be prepared to put them out unless you want a hull breach. In v1.0 (yet to release), the Spanner can be used to fix damage. The shuttle may also be damaged by the alien in higher difficulties.

 

Ways to kill the Alien are, physical attack (Incinerator does most dmg but can cause fire, laser is 2nd best, followed by elec prod, even spanner and extinguisher do some dmg when used. Item in the left slot with white edge indicates that is the item currently used. The red number shown in bottom right of the char avatar is the count of other crew in the current room. Theres a limit of 3 people in any room, so be careful not to block yourself in etc. You could also try to lure the Alien into an airlock and blast it out into space. If all else fails and you have less than 4 crew left you should consider abandoning ship. In order to do that you should set self destruct, catch jones the cat in the cat carrier and get the 3 or less crew to the shuttle, but youve got to hope the shuttle isnt damaged and the alien isnt nearby. Mother will not allow a launch if any 'none alien lifeforms' are still on the main ship, and likewise mother will not launch if the alien is on the shuttle.

 

Removing the grates allow you to use the tunnels, which is where the alien may hide.

 

At some point during the game one crew member (if still alive) may turn out to be an android, and at that point they go crazy and start attacking other crew members. Be careful as the android will go mad and cause damage, fire, trigger or cancel self destruct, and even blow you out the airlock if it gets chance.

 

The tracker will sound (if used) when Jones or the Alien are nearby. The android wont sound the tracker as the tracker is calibrated to masses other than typical human size. You can save someone from dying by putting them into hypersleep when theyve taken lots of dmg - but this will mean no chance of using the shuttle, you are fighting to the last man if you do that, but its the best way to try and keep all crew alive and still win.

 

If a crew member is an android, Jones will sense that and absolutely refuse to get into their cat box.

 

If a crew member dies or goes into hypersleep they will drop their items. The mental state of a crew member effects their ability, they can do more or less dmg, and can run off on their own if morale and health drop too low, they may even drop their items in the panick. Being in the same room as dead bodies or the alien will lower morale. Moving to a room with people already based in there will increase morale if person entering the room.

 

Theres probably more but thats the majority of it. One of the items can insta kill the crew member if used against the alien - think about acid damage and which item might cause acid and you can avoid that risk ;)

 

Fire will also spread if left unattended.

Edited by GadgetUK
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Btw, the up and down is the primary 'select a crew member' method. If you press left it goes through the 'live' characters you are in control of only (quicker than scanning through all 7 when some are dead), and if you press right on the d-pad it will show you the last person the alien attacked - this way you can tell who its actually focussed on as well.

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It might take 108 a while yet to do the images for v1.0 so here's v0.91. I've made quite a lot of changes - some small cosmetic and some bugs / new features etc. You can use the Spanner to repair dmg now. There's an ending screen, new icons at the bottom to improve gameplay and screen usage - 1 icon (skull) shows there are corpse(s) in the room (lowers attack chance due to morale), grille icon to show state of the grille in the current room, and an icon to show items are in the room. Stereo sound for Lynx 2 as well now. Numerous other small changes i've probably forgotten about.

 

There's one bug I know about with the tracker sound glitching.

 

http://www.c5software.co.uk/downloads/Alien0.91.zip

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Can't wait to see the Game with the Graphics of 108 Stars!

 

Me too!

 

I've fixed that tracker sound bug from the 0.91 released last night. It's a strange bug - seemingly caused by the output from Chipper, either that or a bug in the driver itself - something related to the length of the tremolo data. If I shorten it to as below it no longer causes a problem. It's like that extra length on channel 0 means that sounds played on channels 1, 2 and 3 cause the sound to get stuck for some reason for a second or two.

 

;clashes when other sounds play on other channels - is it the actual values that are wrong?

.byte $02,$05,$29,$00,$01,$FF,$01,$00,$01,$00,$01,$00

 

;seems to work fine

.byte $02,$02,$1F,$00,$01,$FF

 

I've also swapped the 'bodies' icon and the 'items in the room' icon to make it easier to see when there are items in the room. Just waiting on 108 now ;) I will get back on with JackAttack when I can motivate myself but it might be a while as i've started playing around with PIC chips, and i've got a Logic Sniffer and Bus Pirate on the way so I might be busy with those for a while.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Sorry, I should have clarified. I meant the bodies and items in the room icons being switched... as you described in the above post. Makin it a little easier to see... ;)

 

Ah thanks, phew, thought there was another bug there. I am fairly certain that most if not all of them are fixed now - famous last words of any developer... I've tested it pretty extensively but there might be the odd bug still there - things like can you operate shuttle, destruct, airlocks from vents etc - I am pretty sure you can't but those are the sorts of things that are easy to be bugs. Also very long menu lists might be buggy as I cannot test it easily - eg. when you've got options to Move, Attack, Get, Drop, Use, Catch Jones, Extinguish Fire, etc etc. In the scenario where there are more options than screen size the menu jumps to the very top of the screen and colours its background, and then it should all fit on the one screen. I did do a change to items, if more than 1 item of the same type is in one room its listed with an asterisk next to it. eg. Tracker *

 

I will try and get some time later in the week, I would prefer to wait for 108's images tbh if I can. If anyone spots any more bugs please let me know - and you should be using 0.91 to test with.

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  • 3 months later...
  • 1 month later...

Hi, sorry i've been so busy with other systems recently.

 

I did a recent video of v1.0 minus the new graphics, 108 Stars kindly sent me the character images and one of the decks but i've not got around to adding them in yet and will probably wait until i've got the other 2 floors. I bet 108 Stars is wishing he'd not volunteered for the job lol. I imagine the Alien will be hard to do - it's all very well with 1 frame but doing the different frames so it animates OK will be tricky. I think we might end up with just different character sprite and the decks / floors.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OusNudrE-F4

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No, I'm happy to do it actually.

It's just that so much is going on in my life that evrything seems to be too much for me. But it's a cool game and it deserves nice graphics.

 

I hope to bring the game to e-Jagfest in 2 weeks, meaning that by this time next week the graphics will have to be done. Then still it could be too tight for GadgetUK to finish it up in a week, especially since this is the first he hears about my plan.^^

 

I am actually a bit embarrassed to go to e-Jagfest, because with both me and matashen having had almost no time to work on our stuff none of the games I presented last year is complete. Neither is the 1st person shooter from obschan, or Pitfall, or TLA. Life sometimes sucks. :(

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I am actually a bit embarrassed to go to e-Jagfest, because with both me and matashen having had almost no time to work on our stuff none of the games I presented last year is complete. Neither is the 1st person shooter from obschan, or Pitfall, or TLA. Life sometimes sucks. :(

No need to feel embarrassed. Its good to see your friends and to chat and catch up. It doesn't matter (to me at least) that people's projects haven't gone to plan. After all, its a hobby and not work.

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Basically just the final touches on each.

 

It took me the longest to do things like the character portraits and the shuttle (which I wanted to look close to the movie, but the scenes in the movie are very dark and it's not easy to make out the layout), but I sent him yesterday. I guess I will finish my part of the work today. :)

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