Insecticide is back

Entry posted by atari2600land October 10, 2011

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Hi all. I'm back working on the Virtual Boy game "Insecticide" (formerly known as "Insect Combat.") I got Gi-Ant's crawling animation to the point where it doesn't have any issues with the picture going weird, so that's good. I had copied and paste some code from another game to make it look OK, which I didn't know if it was going to work or not, but it did. I had stopped working on it because I was getting annoyed by the fact that I couldn't make it work and nobody wanted to help. So I decided a break was in order, so I hadn't worked on it for a few weeks. I also reread some things about stuff I didn't understand how to do. Luckily for me, it worked. The sprite maker does not want me to show the sprites he had made yet, so I won't, which is a shame because I think they look really good and he did a good job on Gi-Ant's crawling routine. What's next to do? Well, I need to put the new Rumblebee's background he had made in, so that is what I'll do. I also need to get the palettes right on Gi-Ant. Anyway, I was thinking of having a tournament mode in addition to what I had planned where you can pick your opponents. In this tournament mode, you'll go through all seven fighters. I also want to keep track of wins and losses in the choose your opponent mode (I haven't found a word for that mode yet.) I wonder if that would be something that can be doable, like maybe in Teleroboxer. I haven't played Teleroboxer because I don't really like fighting games all that much, I just thought a fighting game using insects would be an amusing idea. I have Killer Instinct for Game Boy and I played it once and had no idea what I was doing. In the end, I want to make a fighting game that anyone can play regardless of how good you are at them or not. I'm trying to base this on the KI for Game Boy. Maybe I should get Mortal Kombat for Game Boy (if it exists) and play that game as well. The current plan for controls are left up and left shoulder to make the insect get on its rear legs (or begin to fly around if it has wings.) and left down and left shoulder to make the insect go back down. The right control pad controls the movement of the characters. There are punch and jump buttons as well in A and B. A is jump and B is punch. There will also be special moves that each player has, maybe with the right shoulder button? I'll have to do more thinking about that.

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Propane13 577

Posted October 11, 2011

The one trick for special moves is to make them happen with a combo of buttons.

In doing so, it makes it more difficult to pull off-- i.e., it'll take a few seconds to press "up, up, left, left", which could cost you dearly and allow the other creature to attack. So, I'd recommend that over just a single button.

Combos for Mortal Kombat on Genesis included:

- A, "towards", A (so A, left, A if the opponent's on your left, A, right, A if the opponent's on your right)

- left, right, up, down

The combos also made for "finishing moves". So, if you knocked someone down to zero energy, they would stand there limply.

You could just knock them over with any move to win, or you could type in some ridiculous code (toward, toward, away, away, start), to have a special ending to the fight.

I'm not suggesting that you go with both of these options, but what I am conveying is that the combo button moves always make a game fell more like an arcade beat-em-up. You may want to consider that over a right-shoulder-button single press. Just a thought.