TROGBlog

Nice! This game is coming along great. Funny thing... whenever I played Star Castle, it never really occurred to me that the score wasn't onscreen during the game.

 

Anyway, two things I noticed about Stellar Fortress (or perhaps Stellar Fortress ) - first, your ship never slows down, so you can just get going in a straight line horizontally, turn your ship towards the fortress, and blast away while coasting along. Second, going at top speed, it's possible to pass through the fortress (you have to hit it at an angle). Sometimes it will pass all the way through, sometimes it will go into the fortress, and bounce off the inside of the far wall. This happened with the last build too.

There is another old adage that says "Atari homebrew developers stay up way the hell too late." Time to get some .

I've found that to be very true!

 

Impressive so far. The sounds are very fitting and I like the shield generating effect

Thanks for the feedback guys.

 

Nathan - I decided to make the game as true to physics as possible, so the ship will not slow down during normal flight, given that space is a vaccum. However, I will dampen the velocity energy when the ship hits the shield, by around 10 percent. That dampening hasn't been implemented yet.

 

There are a few known bugs in the game. I try to keep those listed under known issues. Don't worry about reporting bugs yet. I'll be more focused on removing bugs when the code goes alpha, which probably won't happen for another 20 revisions.

 

There are several problems with the ricochet physics. As you mentioned, the ship can pass throught the shield at high speeds. I'll probably reduce the top speed to fix this. The ship also sometimes bounces at unexpected angles when it hits the corner of the shield. I'll overhaul that code when the full vertical resolution is implemented.

Keep up the good work!

 

I'd love to write a game... I am more of an idea person... & would need someone to do the programming...

So.. for now, my games are only playable in my head.. LOL..

 

But, seriously, so far looks great

Good Luck on it!!

SI

Looks very nice, and nice work with the sounds.

Well, I've been looking at the ship again (posted in this thread), and after actually playing it on real hardware, the vertical position of the ship does indeed seem too narrow. As you rotate in and out of that position, it seems to "pop". Plus one of the other positions seems to have a detached engine, which I didn't really notice before.

 

So I've made a revision to the sprite, and hopefully this will work a little better.

 

 

And the frames:

 

(frames 3 and 5 are the only changed ones)

 

On another note - I thought of an interesting possible game variation. As an option, have the fortress generate a gravitational field, like the sun does in Space Wars. I think that would add a nice extra dimension to the game.