Glenn Saunders wrote:
>
> The game has some technical merit to be sure. It's single line res
> throughout, and this gives it a very crisp look.
Well, I've written ~2000 lines of completely original code for this over
the past two months. Almost nothing was re-used from Dark Mage. Even
little things like the VSYNC and OverScan-delay-loop sub-routines have
been re-written as part of the PAL support... 63 bytes of data were
borrowed from Defender to get some real digits up quickly and looking
nice, but that will definitely go as well. I'd hope this effort would
not result in a merit-less turd. Thanks.
> It would be nice if the lander had some indication of the engines firing,
> though,
So far, you can hear them--right? Seriously, the kernel is currently
undergoing a big re-write that will allow for this, as well as an
explosion animation, and maybe some other niceties, if they fit.
> and all of the sprites are monocolored. It would be nice to
> stripe them some if possible.
I'll experiment. I kinda like the asteroids ghostly white. When I
replace them with space ships on the trip back, multi-coloring might
work out. The mothership and lander are pretty tough to mess with in
this kernel. But I'll definitely look into it after I've changed things
up.
> I do think the gameplay needs to be deepened with variously shaped
> platforms and more randomness. Instead of hardcoding the platforms you
> could use a mathematical algorithm like Pitfall and River Raid. That's
> the most memory efficient.
Missiles, variety, cosmetics, etc., all are good and all will add to the
game, and all will be worked on given time. But as you probably know,
adding a better thing to a game will almost always result in one of two
things: A) it no longer fits in the allowed memory space, and/or timing
constraints, and is relunctantly disgarded, or B) the fancy new
algorithm that makes it fit took an extra month or two to write and
debug.
--
mor@xxxxxxx
http://www.crl.com/~mor/
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