SpiceWare's Blog

How about (randomly) incorporating the player's current movement direction? Especially if the robot is further away.

I'd thought about that as a way to compensate for the lack of on-screen shots, but decided to do homing missiles instead. Homing missiles have a different shape than normal shots, you can see them in the screenshot above - the robots are using homing missiles to point at the humanoid.

 

Homing missiles can change their direction in flight, but only 1 time after being fired. The robots will shot normal missiles while the tanks will shoot homing missiles. I'll set it up so when the game starts you'll mostly get robots, with an increasing chance of tanks as you work your way thru the game.

 

I haven't decided yet if the tanks will only show up in the Frenzy style game, or if they'll also appear in the Berzerk style. The main differences are:

 

• Berzerk
  
• only robots
  
• 8 moveable wall segments
  
• walls are lethal to both humanoid and robots
  
• Evil Otto is invincible
  
• no special rooms
  

• Frenzy
  
• robots and tanks
  
• 15 moveable wall segments, 2 wall styles -shots either destroy the wall or are bounced off it.
  
• walls are not lethal
  
• Evil Otto can be killed (though he respawns and moves faster)
  
• special rooms appear periodically: Big Otto, Power Plant, Central Computer, and Robot Factory
  

Instead of allowing to change direction once, maybe it is easier (and better looking) to limit the direction change. So that the missile cannot turn 90° in one step, but has to fly a curve instead.

So up to 2 direction changes of 45° each. That could work.