LÖVE

@coffee: Dodging and stuff would be cool, as would patterns. It's honestly far more than the game was ever intended to be, however. (I may still give it a shot; who knows?) It's kind of cool that you find level 13 to be the boring enough to give up part, since the game technically stops adding anything but slight difficulty increases at 12th ... strange thing, I know, but boredom in this case tells me that the implementation is pretty much spot-on with the design parameters. I do agree, of course, that it needs more.

@josefnpat: The actual game would do that, for sure. This is just the game play segment (compare with the earlier beta version, for instance...although a bug in that will sometimes flash by the game over notice if it happens to read the player's last game inputs).

By the by, if anyone's interested, this is the game which I had in my head when I first started this project. http://www.allegro.cc/files/depot/2352/AlienAlley.zip Or, rather, it's a Win32 port ... the original DOS game can be found, but I haven't been able to get around Windows' refusal to run it in fullscreen mode (it's Mode X, if I remember correctly). I daresay SpaceHorde is a fair amount away from the thing that sparked it, but y'know. History and stuff. (It was originally an example game created for the book PC Game Programming Explorer, by Dave Roberts.)

K. 'Nuff said for now; I'm off for another long weekend of work.

Now that I see your inspiration I saw that you should had work first in a basic enemy movement. That game put yours in a corner in terms of enemy mobility. That ships know how to move.

However have a good pattern the game turns to be boring after a while. All pretty the same, only fighting for hi-score and beat Gill Bates 1000 points. I give up at 1500 but till then was fun avoid or target enemies. Yes, compared with "original" you got far with some extras but now I see you missed the original (and only?) good feature in that game: simple but efficient enemy behavior. I think was some bug there that makes sometimes an enemy "frozen" in X axis. Other thing is that Y movement is almost useless there. At least in your game is useful for get in advance "power ups". I preferred in Alien Alley only have one life there than your multiple life+energy life combo.

Meh.

The only difference in enemy behavior between that port and the way I move my ships is that it moves further along the X axis than I do. It's still an entirely random and brainless algorithm. Okay, two differences. They also stop occasionally. I think that's actually something introduced by the person who ported the game; I don't remember it being in the original. It also seems to have introduced a bug where they sometimes freeze entirely (as you pointed out).

Hardly knowing how to move or putting me in a corner. It simply does the same thing on a wider scale, while adding a fatal flaw for seasoning.

EDIT: Okay, okay. I'm not being fair. The flaw is hardly a fatal one. I've only seen the game crash when trying to switch from mouse back to keyboard. Haven't tried their joystick implementation yet ... the mouse one, I didn't like.

I'm feeling a bit better now, so I'll try to make this post a bit more worthwhile (ha, right)....

I experimented a bit with my code. Widened the incidence of move biasing for the X axis, increased the likelihood it'll remain on, and equaled X movement to the same speed as Y (it was half before). It's alright, I guess; still doesn't seem to cruise as far as the port does, and seems to increase difficulty (player response sort of thing). I also tinkered with halting, but really didn't like the results. Beside the sitting duck syndrome, it seems to slow play down.

If I get a chance, I'll see if I can do something about giving the enemy the ability to dodge shots. The tricky part (for me) is to keep them from being too good at it.

As for a storyline ... I don't think that'll be happening. The game's far more than I'd wanted it to be to start with, so I want to concentrate on implementing the existing ideas that haven't been put in yet, and wrapping it up. It's threatening to lose my interest otherwise (believe it or not, I'm not really fond of shooters; they're just a good way to blow some steam), and I'd much rather have a "finished" game than an abandoned one. It can always be improved/expanded on in a revisit.

Experiments from last night. Nothing too fancy; just trying out some move patterns & basic dodging. So-so. (The new ship is from a previous tinker. Again, so-so ... it didn't really seem to add to the game.)

Yea or nay on the patterns/dodging?

I'm glad that you regret a bit of your initial words (I thought you kidding or had a bad breakfast) because I didn't knew what more to say then.

Things are better now with diagonal strikes and more X amplitude movement. Game is harder and that is good. Liked the new blue ray enemy ship addition. Perhaps the movements are too "straight". You know that cos/sin math formulas (I don't know a thing about it) to smooth movements? Maybe one would help. One problem now is that starting at level 9 the first time you die the game practically is over. Because since you powerless and unless you get lucky is very hard/almost impossible collect power ups so fast or have chance to protect in a dense enemy zone. So you lost all accumulated ships very quick without chance.

I remembered a simple old 48k game designer for ZX that you help you analyze and get some basic attack waves patterns. Load it in some emulator.

coffee wrote:I remembered a simple old 48k game designer for ZX that you help you analyze and get some basic attack waves patterns. Load it in some emulator.

Hmm. I've never used a ZX ... and I've no idea what I'm looking at, LOL.
EDIT: ^Okay, it wasn't loaded. Not sure how to get it to load.

Clearly you need to go find the magnetic tape that has your binary coding for this game!

MarekkPie wrote:Clearly you need to go find the magnetic tape that has your binary coding for this game!

Heheh.

I was more the VIC-20 kid. (And yeah...I've got an emu for it. Even works sometimes! )

Apologies for the double post.

Would it be worthwhile for me to put a SpaceHorde dev up here that's the same content as the last, just with mouse & gamepad controls added? (The mouse hasn't been tested extensively and may be buggy. Personally, I prefer keyboard or gamepad.)