Here is my advice:
Aesthetics
Could you give the wing tips of the spaceship a different color?
How about making a different life indicator? Are there sprites left for
that? If not, why not moving the indicator down vertically where those
sprites are free?
Aesthetically I think we should try to avoid simple solid block graphics
wherever possible.
Fringing the pearls vertically with gradients of grey would also help, but
may not be possible CPU-time-wise.
Also, it seems as if the ships/monsters pop off the screen when they
scroll back to the right too early. Is this necessary or can they get
farther to the right of the screen before they disappear?
As for the new flickering missile graphic for the boundaries of the
pearls, aesthetically speaking these tiny graphics do not really fit in
with the rest of the game, which is primarily double-line res sprites. Why
not use the width register and bring them out a little more. If possible,
why not make them random noise like in Yar's Revenge? If this is too
distracting, you could mute the colors so they stay relatively grey.
Gameplay:
Do you have any enemies that require 2 or more shots to kill? This may be
something to add as the difficulty ramps up, as well as upping the overall
speed of the attackers.
Also, maybe you should penalize the player if a pearl is not taken and
moves off to the right by having it mutate into a unique creature.
The reset switch is disabled during gameplay. This is a nono. Please
restore it so that you can restart a game without having to actually end
the current game. On the SC you can not reset a loaded game just by
powering down and back up again. Also please implement the "couch potato"
reset hook to the fire button as all mid to late 2600 games do. Heck, you
could hook the game select to up/down on the joystick too if you had the
memory.
As for game variations, why not building a matrix for options such as
curvy shots, single vs. doubleshots, and whether you can group pearls
VERTICALLY as well as horizontally? It seems as though a vertical bar
would be harder to create than a horizontal one, because creatures that
remove pearls are always coming in at different vertical spots. It's much
easier to "protect" a horizontal band and build there than it is to build
vertically. The more variations the better. It's much better than
hardcoding one or the other in there.
Another option might be to make the spaceship 50-100% wider (vertically)
so that one can no longer thread the needle just by shooting one enemy
when three are coming at you. This would REALLY make it difficult.
Not having read any docs, I don't know how you are ramping up difficulty
but there are issues such as extra lives, et. al. which will no doubt need
to be fine tuned before you should stop development on this game.
Games like Atari's Phoenix suffer from being way way too easy, which kills
replay value. The best games like Kaboom were heavily playtested to tune
the difficulty in such a way that it would remain challenging to the
novice and the expert.
There is no way for you to know how easy or hard it is until we are
allowed to play it for a while and give you our high scores.
If would be nice if this game had a difficulty curve that eventually beats
all but the select few, so it's theoretically possible to continue
playing, but only with pixel-accurate movement and frame-accurate timing.
SOUND:
The sound is very good, but it suffers from there being no default noise.
I'm wondering whether it ever uses both sound channels at once. Does it?
It would be nice if there were a general ship noise that it would default
to and a "whoosh" when you change directions rather than the dead silence
(other than the beaming in of enemies).
If you work on this stuff you'll have a title at least as good as any 4K
Activision or Imagic title! And remember, unless this game has to be a 4K
ROM, if you run out of memory, don't be afraid to take advantage of the
Supercharger's features. The writable memory and the multiload
capabilities are there to be exploited.
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== Glenn Saunders http://www.lawguru.com/production/production.html ==
== krishna@xxxxxxxxxxx http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ ==
== Stale homepage @ http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698 ==
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