SpiceWare's Blog

I haven't played enough to give good feedback on the re-spawning, but I did try out the two player mode with alternating players (1 joystick). I found a small bug in that once a player dies his shot continues. The Asteroids for the next player then appears on the screen with the previous players shot, and if it hits an asteroid then the new player gets the points for something they didn't do.

 

I made a savestate if you need it, but I think the explanation is clear enough. In the savestate it shows the player 2 starting the very first time already at 20 points from player 1's dying shot.

 

 

I think in one player mode the shot continuing makes sense. What would happen though (in 1 player mode) if you died your the final death, and your shot continued and destroyed something which gave you enough points for a new life. Would you still be permanently dead or would you live again?

Good find on shots, that should be an easy fix.

 

 

Good question - I would have expected you to live again, but in reviewing the code just now I see that once END_OF_GAME_DELAY gets set the game is going to end in 2 seconds. I've modified the bonus life routine to reset EOGD so you'll get to play that extra life.

I like the select-a-color option. It's hard to see the color you're selecting though until you move off of that option. Maybe if the menu flashing were slowed down, or if the colored part of the flash stayed on longer than the gray portion did.

Yeah, it is a tad hard to see the color. I've added a few test builds (NTSC). One that flashes at half the speed, one that flashes asymmetrically, and one that flashes just the option name.

 

I'm partial to just the option name, though there is a minor issue in that the multicolor asteroids have a little bit of flashing as the blue is used to color some of the asteroids.

I added a couple more builds to get feedback on for the monochrome games. One has a darker luma for the asteroids so when flicker does occur it shouldn't be as noticeable. The other has variable luma for the asteroids.

2 players 1 joystick? Sounds like a video I know:

um, thanks

I like the option one as well, except for the blinking rocks (minor gripe though), my second choice would be half-speed. In either case, I think they'd work better if flashing with a brighter value than gray. Maybe a gradient to match the rest of the text, but starting from white:

 

 

As for the other test builds, I don't care for the variable luma rocks (too far away from the vector look). The darker luma works better, but I'm not sure I like it as well as the bright luma. I'd have to check it on a real TV, and I don't have a working 2600 at the moment (still).

I think it was darker because the same gray is used to flash START. I'll double check though. Could just change START to RED and thus have an RGB menu.

 

 

I normally play multicolored which uses random luma values. When I play tested monochrome on the sixer I found the flicker to be distracting which is why I decided to try the random luma and lower luma builds. I'll probably go with the lower luma.

Yeah, I'm going with 8 for the monochrome asteroid luma - I just spotted this in the source for the mulitcolored asteroids:

// select color based on level, add a random luminance

// from 4 thru 11 (so asteroids are not too dark or too bright)

color = (LEVEL_NUMBER[player] << 4) + (Random32() & 7) + 4;

 

The other thing it does is gives the asteroids their own luma value. The luma values used are:

4 - player 2

6 - UFO (small enemy)

8 - monochrome asteroids

10 - Saucer (large enemy)

12 - player 1

14 - score