Re: [stella] Difficulty Switches vs. Tap

Subject: Re: [stella] Difficulty Switches vs. Tap
From: "Glenn Saunders" <cybpunks@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001 10:23:11 -0800
In your game, the reverse gear is a central part of the
gameplay, so it should be easily accessable. The difficulty
switches aren't good for this (and maybe would get broken
soon).

Remember, reverse gear is a choice, not a necessity, to play the game. If people are concerned about the durability of their switches, they can decide not to utilize the feature, or only play with reverse every once and a while to avoid stressing the switches too much.


Our Atari's are around 20 years old now so the fact that the vast majority of them haven't broken says something about their general durability.

For faster turning you could recognize abrupt twists and use
them. Based on the old turning direction you could use a twist
with +2 for faster turning (4 frames) or a full 180 degrees
turn (1 frame!).

I'd rather drop reverse entirely than to have some kind of weird way of performing the gear switch that would take too much effort on the part of the gamer to pull off, and/or result in accidental gear switches.


It's not like single-click double-click on a mouse. It's an action game so taps and other spurious behaviors are going to happen. You can't expect people to be quite so precise and mannered in their handling of the controller. I'd like the game to be somewhat forgiving.

It's actually not that hard to do a quick 180' turn. The change to the gameplay of not having reverse would probably be subtle. That's why I wanted to support it with the switches. Emulator users wouldn't need to care about banging on their keyboards and maybe by the time the game is released someone will come up with a Booster Grip like device for this application that I can write hooks for, for those people who are concerned about breaking difficulty switches.

If you go over to the Vec newsgroup you'll see that homebrewers are not afraid to write games that support unorthodox controllers, like adaptors for the Atari paddle and driving controllers. I don't see why the same can't apply here.

Even best-case there won't be many Death Derby carts produced, so making a small run of special hardware shouldn't be that much of an issue--and it makes the game more special in the process. Cyberpunks would be willing to pay the overhead of making these things if someone came forward willing to design and build them.

If this item had a mode that allowed for extra buttons for the joystick, driving controller, or paddles, I think it would be quite useful for future games, and as a booster-grip replacement.

Paddle games especially need a 2nd button. Every time I think of how I would do a Warlords 2 I have trouble coming up with ways for it to work with only one button.



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