Sasuke Vs. Commander (alpha build)

[Mik's Arcade]

53 minutes ago, Steve Jones said:

I think you might have made it too hard, earlier versions I got through several levels without much problem, but now I am lucky to kill 3 or 4 enemies before I die.

Is there a happy medium somewhere between the two? To be honest after dying so fast in several games in a row there is no incentive to keep trying.

 

Thanks for taking the time to play with it, I will look for a happy medium in the final build.  Even testing it, I consistently die even though I know how the patterns work. The main problem is that there is less vertical space for the enemies to work with than in the original arcade.  

 

I think the best way to find the happy medium is to not allow ALL of the ninja to bounce off walls, maybe just half of them. The coin-op is very random when it comes to the ninja wrapping around the screen, bouncing off the trees or just disappearing so perhaps I will do the same.  If you got to the green ninja waves, the first 2 are total death traps, I will probably change it or at least slow them down.  Also, as much as I like it, I will also probably stop dying ninja from firing weapons,  as that is not in the original game. The falling ninja that can still kill you is, so I am definitely keeping it as that is a unique feature.

 

Fighting the bosses are hopefully the main incentive to keep you going.  You can unlock a bonus weapon that shoots two projectiles and also goes through enemies so it can take out multiple ones. Once I get them done I will revisit the enemy waves.  I also have an exclusive boss all planned out if I can fit it in

 

 

[carlsson]

3 hours ago, Mik's Arcade said:

The main problem is that there is less vertical space for the enemies to work with than in the original arcade.

I'm not familiar with the original game, but what happens if you rotate the entire game 90 degrees? Sure, it becomes something else than a port, but I feel sometimes that might be worth considering since you at least have 20 columns instead of only 12 rows.

[Mik's Arcade]

28 minutes ago, carlsson said:

I'm not familiar with the original game, but what happens if you rotate the entire game 90 degrees? Sure, it becomes something else than a port, but I feel sometimes that might be worth considering since you at least have 20 columns instead of only 12 rows.

 

You know, I actually did consider that, but now I am really committed to this version.  I already have ways to balance it for an easier experience.

 

One of the first games I tinkered around with was an original game I gave a working title of 'Flip Invaders' that was a space invaders clone that did just that.  With the know how I learned from making this port, I can revisit that game and may finish it this time.

Edited November 8, 2021 by Mik's Arcade

[Mik's Arcade]

Ok, I have the first boss battle done end to end, with win and lose logic in place. I plan on having a marathon coding session tomorrow. With any luck, I will finish coding all the boss battles since I now have the framework in place. This will effectively complete the gameplay coding from end to end.  Then, it will be time to focus on getting the sound effects down so I can time the 'events' to the sound. 

 

I'm hoping to have it done as a Christmas present for everyone. Wish me luck!

 

After that, i plan on reviewing the entire thing and make quality of life changes and improve the graphics and gameplay to look even more like the original and submit it in the next contest. I've been playing the coin-op a lot lately. I really love this game. It's such a weird shoot'em up.

 

Then it's time to move on to the next game.  I will either revisit my original game, Marathon Quest, or continue my Space Invader Clone, Flip Invaders.....decisions, decisions.

Edited November 21, 2021 by Mik's Arcade

[Mik's Arcade]

Man, these boss battles are taking me a bit longer to code than I expected.....but.....4 down, 2 to go.  I'm trying to make them as close to the original as I can plus make sure they are balanced and have some random elements. It funny, the boss battles are all pretty easy in comparison to the regular game. They really are meant to just be fun bonus stages.

 

I've been playing the coin-op a LOT lately and I just realized that at any given time, there are only FIVE ninjas on screen at once. So, that is going to hopefully make the game a bit easier when I remove one ninja per wave.  I'll use the extra spite to either add another enemy bullet or I will just make the bullet itself a sprite instead of a card, which will get rid of the graphical glitch.

[Mik's Arcade]

Well, that's it!

 

I just finished coding the LAST boss battle. I still have work to do to bug fix, synch up the dramatic pauses with music interludes and add general polish, but the meat is done. 

 

Wow, I learned so much and know I still have so much more to figure out.

 

It's been hard, but fun hard.  Maybe someday I'll have a small catalog of decent games to contribute to the community or contribute code to a group project.

 

[Mik's Arcade]

At this point I seem to be talking to myself, but today I plugged in all the game music. I wrote it all myself! Some of the music is original, but most of it is the best interpretation I could come up with for the actual game music.   It really helps bring the game to life. I'm going to create a couple more sound effects and polish up a couple of items and might release it into the wild.

 

I have some major changes I want to make to the main gameplay loop and really want to start over on the game screens, but I guess I should get some feedback from the forum first. I'm interested to see if anyone can actually get to and beat all 6 bosses! It might not be worth it, maybe I can just leave it as it is, call my first game 'done' and try a new project.  It's been so much fun and I'm kind of proud of what I was able to do.  Of course, I never would have done it without all the help here.

 

thanks all, you know who you are!

[+Steve Jones]

Are you posting a new rom?

[Mik's Arcade]

I will post a new topic on the main Intellivision board within a week to officially roll out a new ROM, just in time for the Holiday! 

 

If I get into trying to redo the graphics and core gameplay now,  I won't get it done before then.  I might as well just put the game out there and get some general feedback for improvements before I do that.

[Mik's Arcade]

lol. so close.

 

I keep tweaking things.  I redid the Game Over section, reworked a couple of music tracks and added support for a new life every 10,000 points.

 

Now I'm testing the game loops one more time.  Just need to make sure all 3 variations of the 6 boss fights work. 4 down, 2 to go.  Then I am going to give myself invincibility and gun through all 99 levels before it crashes....err...I mean restarts back at the beginning.  There is no way anyone will get that far anyways.

 

I think this might be ready to go to this weekend, and some time next week for sure.

Edited December 10, 2021 by Mik's Arcade

[+DZ-Jay]

8 hours ago, Mik's Arcade said:

Now I'm testing the game loops one more time.  Just need to make sure all 3 variations of the 6 boss fights work. 4 down, 2 to go.  Then I am going to give myself invincibility and gun through all 99 levels before it crashes....err...I mean restarts back at the beginning.  There is no way anyone will get that far anyways.

Haha!  Famous last words.  

[Mik's Arcade]

3 hours ago, DZ-Jay said:

Haha!  Famous last words.  

i know, that's why I better test....haha.

 

Once it hits level 99 it should then reset to 1. It's really just a number to display at the end of the day.

 

I also need to do something if the score hits 999,999  as I assume the game would crash if hits 1,000,000

 

At this point, the only other changes I would really make are rather large (redo all the screens and further randomize the attack waves), so I might as well just release what I have to the group and see if it is even worth trying to improve or if I should call it a day and work on something new. I'm getting to the point where I am tired of playing my own work.  No matter how much I test it, someone else will find a bug in 2 seconds.

[carlsson]

42 minutes ago, Mik's Arcade said:

I also need to do something if the score hits 999,999

How do you store a such high score? Since regular 16-bit variables are good up to 65535 if you declare them unsigned, I suppose you came up with some solution using multiple variables/bytes/words to form a value, or perhaps the actual score is only 9999 and then you add two static digits at the end to inflate the score?

 

(I can think of solutions how to implement this, just curious if you really did)

[+DZ-Jay]

2 hours ago, Mik's Arcade said:

i know, that's why I better test....haha.

 

Once it hits level 99 it should then reset to 1. It's really just a number to display at the end of the day.

 

I also need to do something if the score hits 999,999  as I assume the game would crash if hits 1,000,000

 

At this point, the only other changes I would really make are rather large (redo all the screens and further randomize the attack waves), so I might as well just release what I have to the group and see if it is even worth trying to improve or if I should call it a day and work on something new. I'm getting to the point where I am tired of playing my own work.  No matter how much I test it, someone else will find a bug in 2 seconds.

 

How I do it in my own game is that I keep a counter that tracks how many times 9,999 has been exceeded.  When that happens, the counter increments, the score resets, and the displayed score changes colors to reflect that.  There is a table, posted in the instructions manual, that tells you the range of each color.

 

The reason I laughed at your comment earlier is because my implementation, as I just described, followed your own thinking:  I'm going through the trouble of making a table that supports virtually infinite scoring, and the manual and the box text points out that the game supports infinite scoring -- but it was all wishful thinking, for I really didn't expect anybody to get more than a couple of thousand points, ever.

 

Then people started flipping the score counter once, then twice! 

 

    -dZ.

Edited December 10, 2021 by DZ-Jay

[Mik's Arcade]

3 hours ago, carlsson said:

How do you store a such high score? Since regular 16-bit variables are good up to 65535 if you declare them unsigned, I suppose you came up with some solution using multiple variables/bytes/words to form a value, or perhaps the actual score is only 9999 and then you add two static digits at the end to inflate the score?

 

(I can think of solutions how to implement this, just curious if you really did)

ok, i will make the score end at 65535....haha.  i'm just about to make my character invincible and test until I get that far

 

this game is hard. i cant even break 10,000 points yet.  the arcade is this hard too.  those quarter eaters!!!

Edited December 10, 2021 by Mik's Arcade

[+Steve Jones]

One thought, I know you are trying to make it accurate to the arcade version, but if it is too difficult people will just get frustrated and not play it,

could that be the reason it was a relatively obscure arcade game? 

Maybe you can have different difficulty settings for those players who no longer have hours to spend trying to master a game.(Ah to be young and carefree again)

Just a suggestion...

[Mik's Arcade]

42 minutes ago, Steve Jones said:

One thought, I know you are trying to make it accurate to the arcade version, but if it is too difficult people will just get frustrated and not play it,

could that be the reason it was a relatively obscure arcade game? 

Maybe you can have different difficulty settings for those players who no longer have hours to spend trying to master a game.(Ah to be young and carefree again)

Just a suggestion...

I'm going to test turning off collision detection with the flying ninjas, except for the ones dropping from the sky (that is literally my favorite feature of the game...lol).  I think this will help tremendously.  I'm already upping the starting live to 5.

 

Either way, I should be releasing this to the wild sometime today.

 

If anyone thinks this is worthy of being a homebrew release, then I will really polish it up. Hard difficulty could toggle ninja collisiions detection

Edited December 10, 2021 by Mik's Arcade

[Mik's Arcade]

Oh man, turning off the collisions makes it TOO easy in my opinion...lol.  But I will leave it.

 

Obviously, I made a new thread on the main Intellivision board, but I consider this game DONE for now.  

 

So please try it out, post your score, or provide me any advice/suggestions.

 

I'm kicking around a few ideas for the next game, and tinkering with a couple of platformers.  I started messing with Jumpman a while back.

Edited December 11, 2021 by Mik's Arcade

[+cmadruga]

One suggestion after having played a few times: I would increase the cadence of player shots. 

The small targets and slow cadence are making the game difficult.

If you notice the original, the player shoots faster.

 

Anyway, great first project!

[Mik's Arcade]

16 hours ago, cmadruga said:

One suggestion after having played a few times: I would increase the cadence of player shots. 

The small targets and slow cadence are making the game difficult.

If you notice the original, the player shoots faster.

 

Anyway, great first project!

Thanks, I will test that out, it is a very simple fix.  Getting the bonus weapon helps 

 

 

EDIT:  Wow, what a difference it makes!  I only had to change one line of code.  But yeah, now i can pick off 3 or 4 ninjas in one pass when my aim is good.

 

thanks for the suggestion, I updated the ROM

Edited December 12, 2021 by Mik's Arcade

[+cmadruga]

Thanks for the change, the new cadence handles much better!

 

If I may propose another fine tuning step, it seems that you need to look into collision detection. 

Take a look at the frames I recorded in slow motion below. I keep missing that same target when clearly a collision should have occurred.

I think players will see a visible improvement in gameplay if you address this issue described here.

 

Keep up the good work! 

 

 

 

Edited December 13, 2021 by cmadruga

[Mik's Arcade]

hmm....i suspect the new change caused that. I tested it, but not extensively. I'll look into it...thanks

[+DZ-Jay]

9 hours ago, Mik's Arcade said:

hmm....i suspect the new change caused that. I tested it, but not extensively. I'll look into it...thanks

I don't think so.  That flaky collision detection was there in the first ROM.  If you are using hardware collision detection, it could be that the objects are missing each other.  You will probably have to use bounding boxes, or make your movement more granular.

Honestly, the slow shooting and the bad collisions made the initial game a bit frustrating.

 

Like @cmadruga says, fixing them would go a long way into making the game much more fun and enjoyable.  With the faster shooting, you're already halfway there.

 

Great job so far!

 

Now, at this point you are at a crossroads:  You can continue nibbling at the edges of your design, enhancing it or reshaping it as needed in order to polish it to a beautiful and splendid shine.  Depending on how much your original design and code align with the practical requirements of that final vision, this can take in inordinate amount of time and effort -- sometimes a lot more than what it took to get to this point!

 

(Christmas Carol took 3 weeks to complete originally as a single-screen game; then 18 months to add multiple levels, better animations, a boss level, music, cut scenes, a proper ending, multiple ranks, practice mode, etc.)

 

Alternatively, you can take the lessons learned, and put all your focus on your next project with the wisdom of experience of having built a real game from scratch.

 

Remember, when you started Sasuke vs. Commander you had no idea about what it took to make a game, and that, in turn, informed your design and logic to whatever extent it could.

 

You are now at a much better place, and your next game will reflect that. ??

 

    dZ.

Edited December 13, 2021 by DZ-Jay

[+Steve Jones]

Just my opinion but if it's not hugely time consuming I think you should polish this a bit more before you move on.  

There are loads of potentially great games that never quite got finished because the programmer moved on to another game.

Note as a non-programmer I have no real idea of the time this would involved, just my thoughts as a layman/player.

[+cmadruga]

I think this enhancement related to collision detection will start to put some real teeth into the game.

Walking away is always an option, but the topic of collision detection is relevant for any game he will make.

So might as well bite the bullet and get some learnings under his belt now.

Anyway, my 2 cents.

 

 

 

Edited December 13, 2021 by cmadruga