SpiceWare's Blog

I like the new brick bouncing. I sometimes see funny double-bounces on the shields, though. Perhaps there needs to be a flag so that a ball can't bounce off a shield if it's recently hit the shield and hasn't hit anything else since.

 

Otherwise, while the multi-ball play is nice, I wonder whether games will last too long before the first king gets knocked out. Once two balls are in play, I would expect things should end faster. Would it be possible to have the dragon come flapping in if a round takes too long so he could toss in another ball, or doesn't the dragon get along with the multi-ball display?

 

Also, I appreciate that you allow multiple angles when launching from "catch", but would suggest that there should be more angles of rotation for the shield to make things clearer.

Hmm, I'll have to play a few more rounds tomorrow. I had added a "debounce" counter and thought the shield double-bounce problem was taken care of.

 

Only 1 of the 3 fireballs is drawn in the dragon section while the dragon's on screen. It's OK for the slow-moving initial fireball, but not so OK when a fast fireball could be crossing the middle of the screen. I could do the same thing the arcade version does - the 2nd fireball "just appears" if the game has been taking too long.

 

The extra angles should be doable, there'd be 9 in all. The current version only uses 3 angles as I had to fit the shield direction (used to position captured fireballs) for all 4 shields in 1 byte. Since I'm now using seperate ROMs for NTSC and PAL I've been eliminating the color RAM variables and hard coding them instead, freeing up RAM for other uses. This won't happen in time for the MGC though.

Are the double-bounces you see occuring when the fireball hits a shield sideways?

 

I used the same logic for "edge of screen" bounces which doesn't work so well if the fireball hits the shield sideways. If the shield is facing up and the fireball is going straight right, the fireball keeps going right after passing thru the shield. Angles that are mostly left-right or up-down that hid sideways have a similiar problem. I haven't spent any time on a solution to this yet.

Also, I appreciate that you allow multiple angles when launching from "catch", but would suggest that there should be more angles of rotation for the shield to make things clearer.

There's 9 different release directions. I'm not sure I want to come up with 9 different shields...

 

What if the captured fireball was displayed in 1 of 3 positions(left, centered, right) for each of the 3 existing shields?