I've come up with the beginning of an original game idea that I hope to one
day develop into a 2600 game, if I can get beyond the How to Draw a
Playfield...
Anyway, it's loosely based on the Playstation 2 game where you try to catch
fireworks that are randomly shot up, mixed with Warlords. I have been
thinking about what could be done with 4-player paddle games for years, and
after seeing the PS2 game at E3, it really got me thinking.
The idea is that the screen has four paddle guys who can move up and down
to catch the balls that shoot up from random places. On collision you
automatically hold the ball and can continue to move up and down. When you
press the fire button it locks you in place and you can rotate your stick
around to aim your shot. When you release the fire button, you "pass" the
ball onward.
So the idea was to use at least two missiles as players and use HMOVE, the
width register, and the sprite flip register to get a full 16 or 32 degree
line rotation out of these one bit objects. That leaves the ball sprite
and the playfield.
I think this could lead to some interesting game variations from this rough
starting point, like how one could integrate playfield bumpers or brick
targets (ala Warlords) and goals, or maybe the paddles could point to a
trajectory (when not holding a ball, hold down button, rotate, let go of
button, rotate to move in that direction, press again to lock down) thus
repositioning themselves horizontally to break the 1-dimensionality of
paddles. Or maybe you could have zones in the playfield that if you hit it
with your paddle, it changes your default paddle movement from vertical to
horizontal.
On the other hand...
If all the paddles were going horizontally instead of vertically, you would
only need to use one player for them and that would reserve player 2, the
missiles, and the ball for other objects that are flying around. Or two
could go horizontally and two veritcally so that they criss-cross eachother
in the middle.
What do you guys think?
Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment
Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698
Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc
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