[stella] Carefull! Don't Fall In!

[Christopher Tumber <christophertumber@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Go look at the attached .bin before going on. Go on, ya know you want to...



Didja spew? Any convulsions? BAHAHAHAHA!


This actually started out Thursday night as a Star Castle type game. I was watching hockey while coding so I couldn't do anything that really needed concentration, like Big Dig so I started messing around with some other ideas. I had orginally intended to use both missiles in triplicate to do three sets of rings. That worked okay except that with all the colour changes and having to push a 0 into GRP0/GRP1 after drawing a sprite in order to compensate for the extra copies there wasn't a lot of time left to do much more on a scanline (tough to work shots &etc in there).

I could've made all three rings one colour, that would have helped a lot but that seemed like a huge compromise. So I thought if I went to single missle and alternated rings, but in a real pattern rather than just flicker (like a strobe or ripple effect emanating from the center) it might look pretty good.

Actually, it was kinda distracting and I may or may not revist all that, I'd still like to do a decent Star Castle (Yar's Revenge not withstanding, it's just not the same..)

But looking at it, I realised I had the start of a tunnel type effect. Like the second level of Tac/Scan or like Magic Carpet. It would also make a pretty good warping effect between levels but it was a bit too much of a pain in the butt (particularly until I realised I really could simplify it into one routine and not need a unique routine for each ring!) to "waste" it as cut scene. So I'm thinking about using it as a key effect. I really, really don't want to do a first person space shooter, given Manuel's got that covered. But I'm thinking a racing game. So joystick would be up/down/left/right and fire button would be accelerate (no brakes! just friction). Or maybe use dual joysticks - Joy 1 up/down/left/right Joy to acelerate/brake [foreward/back]. Or something. I dunno. There's actually lots of cycles available on almost all scanlines (since it's mostly just hitting HMOVE and ocaisionally fiddling with HMM0/HMM1/NUSIZ0/NUSIZ1 and I should be able to move the rings horizontally/vertically pretty easily. So, we'll see what develops...  Actually, I'll probably start by experimenting with a more sophisticated display list of rings to give a better impression of motion (In particular so it seems more than 1 ring is onscreen at a time...)


Chris...

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