Intellidiscs: Weekly development log

[+fdr4prez]

Will the Battle Mode have doors that open? 

 

Having shortcuts will allow for more fighting tactics. 

[+Ryan Witmer]

10 minutes ago, fdr4prez said:

Will the Battle Mode have doors that open? 

 

Having shortcuts will allow for more fighting tactics. 

I'm definitely planning to use the doors in some way, still working out the details.

[+fdr4prez]

One option would be have each player enter from a door, like the warriors, at the beginning of battle (or at the beginning of the round) and more appear during the course of the battle. 

 

You could also have them open and close randomly. 

 

Another thought would be to have the recognizer come after X-conditions have been met to close the doors.  During the recognizer phase the players cannot kill each other, but the player that disables the eye gets the points. 

[+sramirez2008]

Battle Mode is freaking awesome. This is why I have a two-port and a four-port. On behalf of my four-port, I thank you.?

[+Ryan Witmer]

23 hours ago, fdr4prez said:

One option would be have each player enter from a door, like the warriors, at the beginning of battle (or at the beginning of the round) and more appear during the course of the battle.

The idea of the players entering through doors occurred to me, but I think that might result in too many doors at the beginning.

 

My thought right now is to have a door randomly popup from time to time, and any of the players can jam it open in the usual fashion.  After every round, some random number of the doors would disappear.

 

23 hours ago, fdr4prez said:

Another thought would be to have the recognizer come after X-conditions have been met to close the doors.  During the recognizer phase the players cannot kill each other, but the player that disables the eye gets the points. 

Involving the recognizer would be cool, but I don't have enough screen objects for it.  The recognizer uses two of the player sprites, three if you count the probe/door repair thingy.  At best I could have one player fighting it and that would be kind of dull for the others.

 

My current thought is to use a scoring system I've seen in other games.  Every time someone dies, every player that's still alive gets a point.  So at the end of the round, the last survivor will earn 3 points, the guy who died first gets 0, and the others get 1 and 2.  You'll probably play to some pre-set amount, say 10.

19 hours ago, sramirez2008 said:

Battle Mode is freaking awesome. This is why I have a two-port and a four-port. On behalf of my four-port, I thank you.?

The four-ports need all the love they can get.  This is my fourth 5200 game, and all but one use the four controller ports (well, Ratcatcher only uses 3, but still) and the one game that doesn't supports the trakball so it gets a pass.

[+fdr4prez]

35 minutes ago, Ryan Witmer said:

The idea of the players entering through doors occurred to me, but I think that might result in too many doors at the beginning.

In the normal game, you start with 3 enemies arriving so that is three possible doors that can be jammed.

 

In battle mode, there are up to 4 players, so that is only one additional door that can be jammed open... Not so much more.  And that is assuming you can rustle up 4 players.  If it is you versus one other player, then you'd always be starting with two possible doors to be jammed, so you'd start with less possible doors to jam compared to the normal game.

 

what if you have each player always arrive from a specific side (example, red from top, white from bottom, blue from left, red from right), and you confirm that the arriving players are from doors that do not create a tunnel.  

 

You can also color code the doors, so the red guy arrives from the red doors and he cannot jam open the red doors.  so this will prevent the arriving players from immediately jamming their own door.  You can only jam the door from your enemy.

Edited March 8, 2021 by fdr4prez

[+Ryan Witmer]

Here's another video I did today.  This goes through all the game's features and shows the early battle mode, which isn't really much.

 

 

[+fdr4prez]

Great video, thanks.

 

Is it possible to make "Your Man" more blue?  He looks grey in the video.

 

You mentioned that you are testing using an emulator and a keyboard.  Do you not have an adapter for using a real 5200 controller?

5200-daptor - Atari 5200 Joystick/Trak-ball to USB interface (2600-daptor.com)

Edited March 10, 2021 by fdr4prez

[BIGHMW]

FANTASTIC JOB @Ryan Witmer!!!

 

Any chance you might have a ROM for us to try on our 5200 units so we can give input and/or feedback on this wonderful WIP.

[+Ryan Witmer]

On 3/10/2021 at 3:32 PM, fdr4prez said:

Is it possible to make "Your Man" more blue?  He looks grey in the video.

I'm thinking about tweaking the color a bit.  On a CRT it's hard to tell the difference between "your man" and the white enemies.  I need to spend some time trying the options.

On 3/10/2021 at 3:32 PM, fdr4prez said:

You mentioned that you are testing using an emulator and a keyboard.  Do you not have an adapter for using a real 5200 controller?

I don't have anything like that on my PC, but I test on my real system with an Atarimax cart.

On 3/11/2021 at 11:21 PM, BIGHMW said:

Any chance you might have a ROM for us to try on our 5200 units so we can give input and/or feedback on this wonderful WIP.

You can expect one soon, probably next weekend.  I have a few bugs and adjustments I want to make first.

 

I spent most of today doing my taxes but I had some time to get a few things done.  Mostly little details like handling all four players wanting to pause the game in battle mode.  Also made a few bug fixes here an there.  Just for fun, I did this:

 

I decided to make the game track the low score as well as the high score.  Seemed like a fun thing to do, so why not?  This screwed up some of the coloring code (you can see it in the second row of the enemies) but I fixed that.

 

Right now I'm focusing on getting an acceptable test ROM ready for next weekend.  It might even have some primitive sound effects.

[phuzaxeman]

Everything looks great. Looking forward to hear some sound effects and music. I believe the sound is what can really make the tron feel of the game with the graphics. 

[+fdr4prez]

5 hours ago, Ryan Witmer said:

I'm thinking about tweaking the color a bit.  On a CRT it's hard to tell the difference between "your man" and the white enemies.  I need to spend some time trying the options.

yeah, even in the video they appear too much alike, too.

 

Everyone needs some vibrant colors:

 

 

[1980gamer]

For Battle Mode

I would say I would use doors  (from top to left clockwise) I would use doors 3, 6, 9, 12

 

                                 1,2,3

                      12                      4

                      11                      5

                      10                      6

                                 9,8,7

 

These are as spaced as far as possible and no pass-through to start at least.

 

This looks awesome!

Great work!

 

[+Ryan Witmer]

I spent today doing a ton of little bug fixes and adjustments to the single player game, too many to list here, but it felt good to get some of that crap done.

 

I spent a lot of time just playing the game.  I was starting to think that it might be too easy.  This is always hard for me to judge since I know literally everything about how the game works.  My score was getting close to 1,000,000 and I was getting excited to see how tough the guards would end up being.  Just over 800,000 points a new wave came out and *bam* I was dead.  So much for too easy, I guess!

 

That's how I remember I the original game playing, more or less.  Everything seems cool and then suddenly you make a mistake and you're done.  Fun stuff.  I made a lot of adjustments to the recognizer battles and they seem just right to me now.  It's looking really good.

 

I think I'm definitely on track to release a test build next weekend.  Single player mode should be fully playable, battle mode probably won't be, but we'll see what happens.  I plan to put some placeholder sound effects in just to get the code in there.  I need to start looking for people that actually know how to make sound because I'm terrible at it.

[+Ryan Witmer]

Last night I got into one of these coding frenzies that I occasionally have and finished up most of the missing pieces of the single-player game.  After finishing up a big piece of my PC game about an hour ago, I went ahead and did the little bit of work that was left on single-player.

 

So, single-player mode is done.  There may be some bugs and small adjustments that come out of testing, but no other major work is planned.  I definitely plan to release a test build with the complete single-player game by the end of the week, possibly even tomorrow.

 

I'm going to start working on shoving in some placeholder sound effects just to have something there.  If there are any POKEY wizards that would like to help out with the sound on this project, it would be very welcome because I'm no good at this stuff.

 

So yeah, demo coming later this week, for sure.

[+Ryan Witmer]

So I spent all morning testing this on an emulator and along the way I found several bugs, some critical, some not so critical.

 

I think I have them all fixed up, and it's looking really good.  I'm going to spend some time testing on real hardware, possibly tonight, maybe tomorrow.  I plan to have dummy placeholder sound effects inserted as well.  If all goes well, I'll have a demo posted Thursday or Friday.

[+Ryan Witmer]

OK, here it is.

 

This is the first single-player test build.  There's a string 256 bytes from the end that says "Single player test 1, 3/19/2021"

 

Here's what you get:

• Single player mode is completely playable.
• All three control methods should work.

Here's what you don't get:

• Battle mode doesn't work yet.  You can go into it, the different control modes should work, and you can run around and do things with all four players, but there's no game there yet.
• Sound effects that don't suck.  I put a few placeholders in just to get the sound code working but they ain't good.  You might want to just mute your TV.

I'm going to be doing a live playtesting session tomorrow morning at about 9AM US Pacific on my Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/phasercatgames

Feel free to drop in and tell me how awful this demo is.

 

 

intellidiscs.bin

[BIGHMW]

Thanks Ryan, I'll give her a run later on this afternoon.

[+Cafeman]

Feedback:  played on Altirra 

 

1. Please allow joystick button to also start the game. 

2. I like the Phaser Cat logo. 

3. First Game Over got 100 points. Using trigger control option. 2nd game 8750. All pink guys. Didn't kill recognizers (don't know how to play). 

4. You can't hit a guy after your disc rebounds?  Again, I am not familiar with the original game.  Would be a nice gameplay option. 

[BIGHMW]

I also used the trigger mode, scored 50 in the first game, 250 in the second. I just have to get used to the controls in trigger mode (I own only one CX52 at the moment) AND I also still have one left of what used to be two twin controller holders that I got with each Space Dungeon and Robotron so when I get a second CX52 (along with 2 modded CX24s for my 2600 and 7800) I'll try the twin stick mode.

 

Graphics are nice, and BTW, the sound effects do not suck, they actually sound pretty good. As for not having multi-player modes yet that doesn't bother me one bit as I am proudly single and the only one in his apartment unit (111) here at Bishop Park so I don't have to worry about the lack of one.

 

Nice job @Ryan Witmer!!! This game was well worth the wait for all of us to try out for ourselves!!!

[vitoco]

I tried it, but it was hard to get used to the controller mappings in Altirra.

 

What I found annoying is that I had to select the controller again on each try, as it resets to the default one when the game is over.

 

[MrTrust]

I'll try to get it on the real hardware this weekend, but on Altirra, feedback:

1.  Could only get the recognizer to come out once.  And I played to about 20,000 points on one game.  What are you supposed to do?

2.  Game is a little on the slow side, but I assume this is a limitation of the hardware.

3.  The diagonal throws on keypad mode do not feel right.  If I hit 3, for example, the feels like it goes 25-30 degrees rather than 45.

 

So far so good, though.  Thanks for the preview!

[BIGHMW]

46 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

3.  The diagonal throws on keypad mode do not feel right.  If I hit 3, for example, the feels like it goes 25-30 degrees rather than 45.

 

So far so good, though.  Thanks for the preview!

I also, noticed the diagonal throws were just not 45 degrees as well, hopefully that will be corrected on the next build, but so far, everything looks great.  

[+fdr4prez]

4 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Could only get the recognizer to come out once.  And I played to about 20,000 points on one game.  What are you supposed to do?

In the original Intellivision game:

• At minimum: If you block open two doors to create a passage/tunnel and then kill all the enemies, then the recognizer will always come.
• If you have some doors blocked open, but they do not create any passages/tunnels to the opposite side, then kill all the enemies then the recognizer may or may not come (it is random to some degree).  

So recap:

kill all the enemies with an available open tunnel (two opposite doors you can run through) = recognizer always comes

kill all the enemies and have some doors open (but no tunnels) = recognizer may come (random)

kill all the enemies and have no doors open = no recognizer (no doors to close, so no recognizer will come)

 

For Ryan's port here for the 5200 he will need to chime in for confirmation on how closely he is following the original game.

 

[mr_me]

In tron deadly discs you have to teleport through the doors to get the recognizer to come out.  If you avoid doing that than the recognizer will come out every four rounds, I think, unless you have no open doors.  I think it's consistent.

 

And the disc is not deadly in its return path.