[WIP] Cone Ball

[KevKelley]

I finally got a chance to watch and listen to the @ZeroPage Homebrew show and got some great feedback.

 

First, I think in the beginning Tanya was in the teddy bear mode, which is why the enemy was following her and not the ball.  I don't remember if that mode was selected at first or not.  It is only an option for single player mode.  Basically it slows down the enemy, makes him follow the player versus the ball, and eliminates his missile. It will also throw the ball on occasion. When I had tested the game with my sons, my older one did okay with a normal AI while my younger one really just liked walking around so after making the teddy bear mode it seemed to play out where they would walk around and while the enemy would occasionally knock back a cone, my son would get one a little more frequently. 

 

As for the regular AI, that is still a challenge as I am not sure the AI is having an impact on some of the scanline issues (more of that in a bit) but essentially the way the AI operates is that the screen is broken up into 3rds.  In each third the enemy behaves in a certain way, whether chase the ball more or back off from the ball to anticipate recovery.  I also have the speed altered depending on distance to the player, but I have to check to see if I had some lines activated or not.  

 

It was enlightening to see that Player 2 can steal the ball while Player 1 could not. That is something I had completely missed.  I also like the idea of pressing the button a certain amount of times to revive your player.  I have to see if that is possible, as I may have all my variables used but I might be able to recycle a variable for this function, like a movement variable, and then reset it upon respawning. 

 

With the ball being thrown and going through the cones, I had experienced this to and part of me thinks it is a result of the ball moving at a rate to where if it was thrown at a certain point  since the players have subpixel movement.  I have been trying to work on a fix for that. I may rework the angled shot to be dependent on the direction the player is headed versus the direction the ball was going last. I was also trying to add another menu item to allow cones to be pushed in both directions.

 

As for the scanline issues, I can't seem to pinpoint the cause.  Part of me did think it would look neat if the screen did shake a little if the ball hits a cone and I had originally tried to implement the shakescreen feature at first but I would still like to get this resolved.  It seems to occur more frequently with in 1 player mode, with angled shots, and when a player carries the ball through a cone.  For the latter one I had minimized it by essentially turning off collision detection if the player is holding the ball but I think I may have to tweak that a bit.  

 

Thank you all for the great constructive feedback and hopefully my next update will have more functionality and better gameplay!

 

[+Gemintronic]

It's eye opening to have an impartial third party demonstrate your game.  ZPH even digs up manuals and info on the side while playing which is amazing.

 

That being said, dirt league YouTubers can also be insightful.  I've seen hot takes that get frustrated while ignoring the instructions they just handled during unboxing.  They quickly showcase the most unintuitive parts of your game - even causing glitches you'd never think to test for ?

[KevKelley]

I really appreciate everyone. I had only been messing around with bB for a couple years so when I look at all the other great programmers out there I get a bit hesitant. When I first posted Bag Boy I was surprised when @ZeroPage Homebrew played it. While I haven't finished a game yet, I keep working on all of them and watching people play or the comments on the forums have been a huge help. Many times I have watched other episodes and end up thinking how cool something is and it results in me messing around with code. 

 

Cone Ball was started last December but after it sat around most of the year I picked it up after being inspired by some of the other programmers.

 

 

[KevKelley]

Oh. I also forgot the suggestion @ZeroPage Homebrew made about slowing down whoever is carrying the ball. I like that idea and had considered but dropped it when I ran out of space... But since I expanded the game I may just do that. I remember doing that in Crossdock after watching that one episode and I felt that one simple switch was a game changer!

[djpowerplayer]

Amazing game! It's such an original concept I’ve never seen anything like it before well done!! 

[KevKelley]

13 hours ago, djpowerplayer said:

Amazing game! It's such an original concept I’ve never seen anything like it before well done!! 

The credit will definitely be shared with my kids.  They came up with the rules with only slight adaptation from me.  I just have a couple minor fixes to figure out but then it will be completely finished, namely what was brought up on the last ZPH show but even then it is rather quite playable in my opinion.

[djpowerplayer]

Well me and my friend were very impressed by your game. This is such a great community. Also very cool that you are teaching your children about the Atari it's a fun way to learn to program.

[KevKelley]

37 minutes ago, djpowerplayer said:

Well me and my friend were very impressed by your game. This is such a great community. Also very cool that you are teaching your children about the Atari it's a fun way to learn to program.

Well thank you. Hope you all enjoy it. It's fun showing my kids these games. I started my boys out on Atari just like what I had growing up so they have a greater appreciation for things. And the programming is fun. Kind of fulfills a childhood dream. My son is learning coding in school now but it is so different then when I learned but I hope he gets interest in the older systems. I am excited about the block coding project someone had been working on in the forums, as that is closer to what my son is learning now. 

[KevKelley]

Just a little update. I got part of the scan line issue fixed. Namely during angled shot play, while walking through the “cones” it no longer causes a jump but when thrown it happens. I am close to fixing that issue I feel. 

Then I will work on the other things, like player priorities, slower movement while holding the ball, and tapping the button to revive the player. 

 

EDIT: Just wanted to add that I am getting closer to a resolution.  I have a couple parts of code where it checks if it hit or not so that the ball can reverse direction using some temp variables.  From some testing it seems that when i remove defining the temp variables in the part that allows angled shot the occurrence of the scanline issue is almost non existent, with what appears to be an occasional jump when it hits the border.  This may be a completely unrelated issue but I can work on that.

 

The main conflict seems to be in the the angle code, which really just allows the ball to move up or down.  I skip it in straight shot so I am just doing trial by error to see what works and what doesn't.  It has also been a while since I played around with this (9 months) so I needed some reacquainting with the code.  

 

While testing, I don't know when this happened but the scoring seemed to break where the cones would seem to get stuck.  I got it to unstick but instead of dropping from where they enter they seem to drop from the top now, which isn't terrible.  I also made a loop which causes the screen to change color which I think is kind of neat so I will play around with that. 

 

Also while testing some things I came up with a couple new option possibilities.  One would be to allow for the deflecting of the ball by touching of it and the other allowing you to kind of run into a cone with the ball.  These would be kind of bonus features accessible by the difficulty switches should I adopt them.  I don't want to get distracted from the main issues. 

Edited August 15, 2022 by KevKelley

[KevKelley]

Updated .bin in the first post!

 

The last few days have been very productive. With my workplace going through a remodel I had actually gained a little office space so I have had more opportunity to work on these old projects!

 

So after some playing around I think I had fixed the initial scanline issue I had last year.

 

I also fixed the second player being able to grab the ball.

 

I added aiming your shot in angled shooting.  The ball will now travel in the direction you are pushing (either up or down).

 

I made it to where the players move slower when holding the ball (except in single player mode - the AI moves quicker).

 

I made it to where you must tap your fire button to revive your character.

 

I tightened up the collision to minimize the ball passing through the cones.

 

When scoring on an opponent their half of the screen will change color and the game will pause for a second while the cone travels down the chute.  Still gonna tweak this a bit but was running low on space.

 

But...

 

While I fixed the scanline issue from before (which I believe stemmed from multiple pfread statements when the ball would move at an angle), there seems to be an occasional scanline issue when I added all these other changes.  The problem is intermittent and I had not really analyzed the game to see where it is happening from but it doesn't really affect gameplay.  Just an occasional jitter.  If I cannot fix it then it may be a design feature - the ball hits so hard it makes the screen jump! 

 

The main code bank is really low on space so I will look to free up some space before I try to find this scanline issue but I don't want it to take another 9 months!

[KevKelley]

I revisited this today to see what I can fix. 
 

I haven’t updated the .bin yet but I made a change to the computer opponent, as when you have the ball he would still run to you and snatch it out of your hands. I now changed it up to where he will kind of anticipate your toss, back up, and follow you up or down. 
 

I also changed a couple things up a bit to use up less cycles so it isn’t constantly running unnecessary code for the computer. 
 

I also noticed in the Field Draw setting, the players wind up drawing the opposing side so Player 1 basically draws his own targets.  I now have each player place their own cones. 
 

I did not get any scanline issues from this most recent edit. My tablet was running low on battery so there was a bit more I wanted to change, like the colors in Field Draw so the player colors match when in game. I guess when I made this I wasn’t thinking so I made everything match, which is probably why the cone placement was backwards. 
 

I still want to tweak the computer a bit and the only other thing I saw is respawning still seemed a bit funky… but then I forgot about the changes I made last so I probably just didn’t know what I was doing.