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Actually, all those sketches (including the plant) are not that far away from the alien merchant of Xenon 2 Megablast:
Don’t worry, if you do not implement neither no help text nor not no help text, that will never not stop us from not complaining about no things 🙂
Beta 23 (no-buzz Vectrex), some observations:
– During first time calibration, in the initial menu saying “Is this Vectrex a so called …”, in the lower part of the screen the line “no buzz” Vectrex appears twice (for no obvious reason).
– Rectangle calibration help text: I think the part “(scale $80 max)” is irrelevant for the normal player. Leave it out and save some bytes 😉
– Swarm helper help text: “This little fellow (no comma here) is one swarm element (of instead of from?) …”, would save another 2 bytes
– “It will never be displayed perfectly, (no linebreaks here), but you can cho(o)se…”, sorry here one more byte is needed
– Regarding the message of the “Reset” sub-menu: Why is there a blank line between “Calibrations” and “Achievements”?
– When selecting “Reset” from the tools menu, I think it would be better to go back completely to the “very initial calibration” procedure (if that is possible at all). Otherwise the tools menu can look so contorted that (for a less experienced user) it is hard to find the “Calibrate” option again.
Third option?
c) Significantly shorten and reduce the help text.
I know you put much work and effort into this, and it is nice the way it currently is, but I guess a (much) shorter version would also work. Back in the eighties we kids figured out every game quickly and easily just by trial an error (and without the original manuals for reasons I won’t go into). VectorBlade will come with a manual. The help text could be rephrased to a shorter version, and/or the ascii data could be stored using a simple data compression.
The order of my personal preference is c) then b) then a). Last one is a) because of the “pretty dimished”. I definitely would love to have the MH part.
I will also check out the Boss4Intensity (just can’t do it right now). I found that setting the right console brightness (poti on the back) is non-trivial and is different on all my consoles. The rule of thumb “turn it up until you see the dot in the middle of screen, then turn down again until that dot just vanishes” in general did not work very well (if a game uses various brightness levels, i.e. contrast). On my consoles, I ended up turning the poti much more down. Then I usually get a nice contrast between the different brightness levels (had to test this for Vec-Man). If it is turned too high, then the different brightnesses start looking very similar. Will there be some sort of brightness calibration screen or message in VectorBlade?
Edit: Yes, as Helmut said below, this refers to setting the poti on the back only, nothing program internal.
I had already guessed that this might be due to technical reasons. It was just an observation, and it is perfectly fine for me if you say “no” to everyting. I just wanted to avoid that later on you go “oh, why didn’t any of the testers spot this” 😉
Same goes for what I wrote regarding what happens to the ship’s configuration after death. Actually, I like the way VectorBlade currently handles this (despite the trouble I still have with the queen). It adds to the challenge of the game. You really have to watch out not to die.
Video games have funny concepts after all. You have more than just one life! It’s not like that in the real world. Well, except if you are Dr. Who 😉
I did some quick research here. The whole thing of having more than one life was introduced in the very early arcade games to keep the player hooked to the machine, inserting quarters. If you had just one life in the game, less potential players would invested a quarter. If you had lives in abundance, the games would go on for too long, and the machine would make less money. They did some studies back then, and the result was that approximately three lives is the best compromise for attracting players while still keeping the games short enough. The game’s difficulty is closely related to this.
Other weird things in video games: In Scramble, you have to blow up fuel tanks in order to refuel your own ship. Doesn’t really make sense 😉
One more minor observation / thought regarding the scoopies:
While transitioning from one level to the next (Level n+1 appears on the screen), the ship is drawn without any additional equipment. In my opinion, this looks a little confusing when having scoopies at your side. First, the scoopies are there while the action is going on, then you finish the level, now the scoopies disappear while the next level is announced, then they are there again. I might look better if the scoopies just stay at your side while the next level message comes up.
Regarding what happens if you die during a boss fight, here is another possibility (which I have seen in some other arcade shooter but cannot recall the name):
When the player’s ship explodes, all the previously aquired power-up items are scattered across the screen and then start falling down. The next-life-ship appears and joins the action and now has the chance to regain at least some of the power-ups. Usually, it is impossible to catch all of them. A good and experienced player might catch a lot of them, a bad player might catch none of them. So how you end up after losing a life is neither pre-determined, nor totally random, but to a certain degree depends on the player’s skill.
Yet, such a mechanism would probably require a smother transition between two lives (ongoing game play rather than the current level-ends-and-then-restarts scheme).
Well, it is just that at some point while playing Vectorblade today I would have sold a life to get money to buy more fire power 😉
Do you know Xenon II – Megablast (mid eighties, by the Bitmap Brothers, played it on the Atari ST)? That one has a similar style. Get add-ons and money while shooting, then stop by at the shop, trade in what ever you are willing to give away, and buy more stuff.
Feature freeze is perfectly fine 🙂
But while we’re at it: What about some R-Type like power-shot feature for “Vectorblade Mark II”?
Hold fire-button pressed, shot fires only once the button is released again, and the longer you have pressed, the more powerful the shot. So basically you go into evasive manouvering for a while, and then BAM! I always liked this about R-Type. Even if you have nothing else, with this you still have a chance against the bigger aliens. Well, if you are good at manouvering…
Here is a question/idea:
Have you ever considered the possibility that parts of your current equipment (ship configuration) can also be sold in the shop? Trade them in for money, then use that money to buy other things? That would add another nice tactial element. Of course the shop owner is a business alien, buying things back only at a lower price than at what they were initially sold 😉
Just tried beta 18 for the first time. I used a no-buzz console. Here are some minor remarks/suggestions:
– buzz/no buzz selection: text “Button 4 to confirm” is not horizontally centered
– the calibration sub menus all use a different brithness, if your console’s brightness (poti on the back) is set too low at the beginning, some of the entries cannot be seen, so maybe an initial hint like “you will probably need to adjust your console brightness” would be good, or do some “console brightness setup” like in the TestRev card, “turn up console brightness until you see all these lines”, something like that.
– help text of the first boss calibration step, missing letter: “… align the(m) as good as possible”
Argh, those betas come faster than I can plug in my ram programmer…
Thanks, will try beta 16 tonight 🙂
Could you explain the (title) “displacement” effect to me a bit more detailed? I had some trouble with it in the past, and I just want to understand when and why this happens, and if there is a way to avoid or to circumvent it. No hurry. We can also do this off-line in an email whenever you find the time.
I have the same “noise/buzz” effect on my buzz consoles, but not on the no-buzz consoles 😉
Also, when the ship comes in, the VectorBlade letters seem to jump forward a bit, and then jump back when the ship leaves. That happens on all consoles. I have seen this effect in my own projects in situations when an additional object is put on the screen, but I have not yet figured out the technical reason and if this can be prevented by some programming technique?
Side note, just to avoid confusion: the new Beta15 still says “Beta 14” in the initial cartridge menu.
