R: [stella] PCMSG 2.3 (almost FINAL!, now I need a NAME)

Subject: R: [stella] PCMSG 2.3 (almost FINAL!, now I need a NAME)
From: "Piero Cavina" <p.cavina@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 1997 18:21:20 +0200

----------
> Da: Eckhard Stolberg <Eckhard_Stolberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> A: stella@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Oggetto: Re: [stella] PCMSG 2.3 (almost FINAL!, now I need a NAME)
> Data: lunedì 11 agosto 1997 23.04
> 
> >What can still be improved:
> >
> >- "balance" of game elements...:
> >does the difficulty increases too fast/slow?
> >are the enemies/your ship too fast/slow?
> >are the asteroids too hard to destroy?
> >....and so on..
> 
> The game is very good. There are only very little things, that I don't
like.
> 
> The movement is to hard to control. The ship should just move up and down
> the exact rows and back and forth without this speedup-slowdown-bounce of
> the border-thing.

Well, the ship has a speedup-slowdown type of movement (which, btw, is much
longer to code than a simple start-stop movement!) because I really wanted
it to work this way - I've always liked games where the player moves with
some acceleration (think to the River Raid plane, for example). In general,
I think it's not too difficult to control, but there's a point where you're
right: when you're playing near the edge of the field, it's easy to hit the
border and bounce over an enemy. That can be frustrating for the novice
player, but I can't say I don't like it at all.

Thus, I've added a control for border-bounce: switch Player 1 difficulty to
"Novice" and the ship won't bounce, switch to "Expert" and it will bounce
again! :)

> When you catch a crystal, you shouldn't be set back a bit.

Uhu? Are you sure? This doesn't happen either on my PAL tv and on emulators
(PCAtari, Stella 0.7)!

> You should be able to fire single shots as well.

Hmmm, if you press the button for a short time a single shot is fired...
however, it was easy to do, then... swith player 2 difficulty to "Expert"
for single shot fire!
 
> Since you only have two shots per line, enemies and asteroids should not
take
> more than two salves to be destroyed. Otherwise you'll get run over too
often.

The difficulty of destroying the asteroids is part of the challenge of the
game: when you can't destroy one, and it gets too near, you must escape
before it's too late.

In the version I'm working on I've made the probability of destroying
asteroids with one shot dependent on skill level:
levels 1-4: 1/2
levels 8-12: 1/4 (this is how it was in the version you've tried)
level 13 and over: 1/8

Stay tuned for the final version. I've just added these things and game
titles...

Ciao,
 P.


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