R: [stella] Status: RESCUE.BIN

Subject: R: [stella] Status: RESCUE.BIN
From: "Piero Cavina" <p.cavina@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 1997 21:43:47 +0200
[Rescue]

> I'd like to A) add more comments, and B) rework the kernel to support
> missiles, before providing original source code.

While the game looks very good, I think that there's something wrong in the
gameplay: it is too easy.
Since I don't think that faster asteroids alone would solve the problem,
I've played the original Lunar Rescue on Mame to refresh my memory.

Well, the most important differences I've spotted are:

in the original,

1- there are more rows of asteroids
2- they're smaller than yours
3- sometimes there are two of them in the same horizontal line and they may
have opposite directions

The last point is very important, in fact it is what makes the landing
phase of the game difficult and interesting.

Thus my advices are:

- try add two rows of asteroids reducing their size and making the landing
platforms shorter;

- add sprite replication (two-medium would be perfect, but also others
could be interesting)

- double the number of asteroids with sprite multiplexing: you could put
the left-to-right moving ones in the even frames, and the right-to left in
the odd frames.

Sometimes flickering is the price to pay for a good gameplay. After all,
Atari Asteroids did flicker, but was also a very good game!

Ciao,
 P.


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