Odp: Odp: [stella] My second game

Subject: Odp: Odp: [stella] My second game
From: "Shrek" <matzieq@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 18:55:30 +0200
> Ah, ok.  Still, I've never been a fan of 2 joystick play...
> I can see where the magic adds to the complexity, but I'd almost
> rather see invulnerability and health restore as tokens to be picked
> up on some levels--

Hmm... lately, I've been playing Radar Lock a lot, and I love this game. I
liked it's controls and handling 2 joysticks was not half a problem I
expected it to be. But anyway, if most people dislike it, I think I should
change it a little bit.

> To "guard an edge" means that the enemy is waiting at the edge (far
> side) of the platform, and not giving my character room to jump onto
> the platform without risking being hit...sometimes there's no room to
> go around and try to jump up to the far side.

Well, you can guard with the sword - the monster won't hurt you. And at most
times you can just run through the monster, it won't be fast enough to hit
you. Hmm... on the other hand, maybe it's a bit stupid :) The monsters
probably should be faster.

> I didn't look at the source...are the 4 lines of platforms done by 4
> parts of a single kernal, or by looping the kernal 4 times?  If the
> latter, you could consider unrolling the loop and having each row just
> have a memory pointer to the monster for that row, shouldn't be too
> different than what you have now. It'll take up ROM space, but it
> might be worth it.

Kernal is the weakest point of the whole game. It's the almost same code
repeated 4 times, but with little changes. And some code is (shame on me)
written because it 'works as it is', not a result of complex analysis:)
Your idea is good, but there are some 'buts'. Pointer to the actual frame of
the monster is calculated outside the kernal, thats one, and if I wanted to
add the info about monster types to the level data, it would use way too
much ROM - I'm already running out of ROM, so now probably I can't waste
another byte for each level.

One great problem that I have with this game is that I don't know how to let
the monsters know if they're walking on the platform, or in the air:) In
this version, there's additional position counter for each monster, that
makes him walk just within one 'platform' (that is, 32 pixels across). It is
not very good, but I have no idea how to do it better...

Maciej




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