Re: [stella] What's the status of Star Fire, Robot City, and Incoming!

[Manuel Polik <cybergoth@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Dennis!

> I know, I know...who am I to ask this question seeing 
> as no one has seen anything of Climber5 since October 
> 2002 :)

*waiting* ;-)

>So what's up with these? Are they still in development? 

Yes, Star Fire is. Meanwhile I changed jobs and have a 
very busy starting time at the new one, so I'm slowed 
down at the moment.

I've been more or less constantly working on Star Fire 
all the time though. Attached is a current WIP snapshot. 

It is a first version that is actually really playable, 
but it is still in early stages. Enemy return fire is 
implemented now, it's just way too slow at the moment.

I'm currently starting to implement a more flexible z-
movement sytem, which give me more control over these 
things and which should allow me to additionally add to 
the difficulty level.

At the moment there's no real end to a wave, just a 
counter running out. Don't know if this is the final 
solution for that.

The Spawning code is only spawning shots and enemy ships 
at the moment, you see there's many areas "under 
construction" right now.

But I'm beginning to see the light ;-)

I didn't send anything to [Stella] lately, because I 
didn't feel anything I achieved was a real breakthrough.

> Have others been in my burn out stage too?

Yup, almost every other week. But there's always 
*encouraging* things happening, like people telling me 
that they're waiting for the game, Paul sending me the 
music, or David Exton sending me the label artwork (BTW: 
Total ultra awesome! He based his work on the arcades 
cabinet side-artwork, yet creating something outstanding 
cool & fresh looking... ;-)) 

Such nice things happening give me an extra boost of 
motivation.

Well. The other trick is: Do something else. Don't care 
about finishing the game. Do something that is fun. 
Don't even look at the source for a month or two. Play 
Asteroids instead. When you come back after a little 
pause, you'll see that it's fun again :-)

My personal biggest problem is that most of the time I'm 
not happy myself with what I'm producing. I'm wondering 
then why other people tell me they really like it, when 
I'm actually almost like "Ah, forget it, it's crap, I 
can't do it, better throw it away, I give up." 

Then I pause, play lots of other games and realize "Ah, 
this ain't really better than what I'm doing. That in 
particular sucks in game XXXXX, I can do that better"...

Maybe just the usual 2600 programmers way to hell and 
back, a never ending cycle... ;-)

Greetings,
	Manuel

Attachment: star6.bin
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