I am planning to show clips of completed new games for the documentary.
Oystron and Okie Dokie are considered complete right now.
Since Rick Maurer was interviewed at length about Space Invaders, INV
would be perfect to show. Rescue as well because it is a port of a Taito
game on the same hardware from the same time-period.
But INV needs some things first.
a) explosions. Explosions for just about everything should be possible.
b) better score. By advice would be to go with (if this is possible) an
interlaced 6-char so you can get a nice tight font on either side.
Something approximating the Taito text look would be nice, plus the "100"
when you blow up the saucer.
c) variations. Invaders is a limited game. It needs some kind of bonus
or easter egg stuff to give it some depth, or variations different from
what we have in Rick's SI port.
d) it would be nice if the missiles were a little better looking. The
original arcade had a few different shaped enemy missiles. This was one
of the failures of Rick's SI that he didn't port this over. Even with the
1-bit objects it has been demonstrated that you can adjust their
horizontal position each scanline to create the illusion of wider bit
objects. This could simulate the SI missile variations quite nicely, as
well as with the width register.
x
x
x
x
x
(alternate by reversing)
or
x
xxx
x
xxx
x
xxx
(alternate by rotating the shape up a scanline)
This would give much more dynamic looking missiles.
e) try spicing up the saucer with some animated frames or blinking lights
or something. On those scanlines all the sprites are available for use on
the saucer so it's worth prettying it up. Maybe have different kinds of
saucers go by, smaller ones or faster ones being worth more. Maybe
letters could go by so you could eventually spell out something (ala
bubble bobble). Maybe a bonus round with all saucers of varying sizes.
What do you think?
==========================================================================
== Glenn Saunders --3D Graphics / Videography / Web development-- ==
== krishna@xxxxxxxxxxx homepage http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698 ==
== Stella@20 video page http://www.primenet.com/~krishna ==
== TV Commercials page http://www.lawguru.com/production/production.html==
==========================================================================
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