At 05:53 PM 3/28/01 -0500, Glenn wrote:
Deciding on a controller will affect gameplay immeasurably. Stampede is
very much like Kaboom on its side, but since it uses a joystick, you are
often placed into impossible situations where the constant nature of the
movement makes the game over inevitable vs. a paddle.
I'd definetely like to use a paddle. My initial versions will use the
joystick and I will add paddle later - I haven't found any decent source or
examples to correctly handle the pot reading, etc.
With your game it might be about timing the fire button when you are over
the necessary information you need to read. If you press the button too
soon you will read too much data, too late and you will miss data. I'm
assuming that the spinning motion of the hard drive will accelerate with
each level and the data will become more fragmented...
Yes. As the level increases, the data becomes more fragmented and the data
bit increase in speed.
Let's say that the game reveals a file (as black pixels) one at a time,
and a file can be spread across the platter of the disk (fragmentation).
After each file is read in, a new file is revealed until the wave ends.
After that your task is to write the files back to disk, hopefully
avoiding fragmentation along the way.
Tapping the button commits you to writing as much to disk as is possible
before it bumps up against another file's chunk. If that happens you have
to tap it again in a free area (fragmentation).
Something like that, yeah. Each level will essentially be broken up into 2
stages: Read and Write. For the Read stage, you have to read the 8 data
bits depending on the color (as mentioned in a previous post). For the
Write stage, you will need to write the 8 bits back onto the drive
contiguously (all next to each other on the same track).
I suppose I could increase the "file length" as the levels get harder
(either that, or reduce the amount of possible space on the drive to write
back the unfragmented file).
Ahh. This is hard to describe in words :) I will try to get to a point
where you can read the 8 bits and then we can go from there.. :)
So there would be a puzzle aspect. If you know how large a file is you
could get a feel by the pace of the spinning how much room there is and
try to line everything up (similar to Tetris).
Definetely..
Just bear in mind that a game that involves reading and writing bits is
not going to be easy on a system with only 128 bytes of RAM... You are
going to make the patterns repeat, aren't you? Games like Kaboom et. al.
were easy to write because they used polynomial counters and random number
generators and didn't have to worry about what happened to things after
the objects hit the bottom. If you want things to wrap around, you will.
I haven't exactly figured this part out, yet.. :P
Thanks for the comments!
Joe
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