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Super Pitifall Retro Demake (Windows/WINE)


Gemintronic

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Super Pitifall Retro Demake (Windows/WINE)

 

Features:

Over 250 screens of hot spelunking action in your face!

Swing Vines, Beatnik Bats and Moody Moas!

Pixels so Big you can Re-Tile your Roof or Stun Small Animals!

Dual Monophonic Sound!



Screenshots

scrshot2-1.pngscrshot2.png



YOU REALLY NEED TO PRESS F4 TO GO FULL SCREEN IN THIS GAME

 

Download Link:

http://sdrv.ms/Y0C3VE

File was scanned with Jotti's Malware-Scan without incident



Instructions:
Controls

Use arrow keys to move Pitifall Larry. Z key to jump. X key to fire if ammo present. Firing while climbing ladder or solid objects will nullify bullets. Aim for bottom of vine to swing. Press UP + JUMP and LEFT or RIGHT to leap off ladders, vines or balloons. Pressing LEFT or RIGHT for an extended duration accelerates Larry and makes him jump higher. Press UP while standing inside door to warp. Press UP or DOWN while on ladder to climb. Use arrow keys to swim while in water. Gates may be opened by touch once its matching key is in your inventory. It is highly recommended to toggle full screen mode via F4. ESC quits. F1 displays this screen. If a joystick is attached it will become the primary controller. To regain keyboard mode detach joystick. Press button 1 to jump or start game and 2 to fire. Pause the game by pressing ENTER.

 

Gameplay



Pitifall Larry is on a quest to obtain the Ralf Diamond. Alas, whilst Larry is adventuring a mysterious group has captured his niece and used magical poison to turn her into stone! To further complicate matters his Niece's Pet Lion Kittyclaw was captured! Find the key to release Kittyclaw from his cage. Obtain the Ralf Diamond. Retrieve the antidote and cure Larry's Niece. Once all of these items have been completed visit Larry's Niece to win!

I hope to port this to a real console. More than hope: I am actively persuing the means to do so.

 

 

Known Bugs:

Pitifall Larry will sometimes get stuck in the walls.

 

Gotchas:

You can waste ammo pretty quick by firing into the wall really close. Controlling yourself on the swinging vines is hard. It helps to leap off the vine while pressing up and the direction you want. Keyboard control gets really sketchy if the joystick is plugged in. I recommend using a joystick anyway. If you like keyboards unplug your joystick temporarily before launching my game. When you die you'll be transported to the nearest way-point you last passed over. Acceleration can really surprise you if you don't keep track of how long you press left or right.

 

Cheats:



A certain key will enable extra ammo and lives..

Edited by theloon
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Tried the game. It shows a lot of promise but several of the play mechanics need a bit of work in my opinion to make it a much more enjoyable game :-

 

- As you pointed out you can get stuck in the walls/floors for no reason.

- Getting off vines is too hard (with a keyboard at least).

- A "jumping noise" but no jumping performed in a reduced height area.

- Firing too close to walls rapidly depletes your ammo. Personally I think it'd be better not to fire at all.

- Flying enemies are a bit too random. It'd be much better if they had more predictable flight paths to you can time your movements past them better. It just seems pot luck at the moment as to whether you make it or not.

- Ideally you need a swimming character when in the water.

- Platforms that fall when you are stood on them that don't look any different to normal platforms. Visual cues to the player are always good that "something might happen". Unfortunately Rick Dangerous style traps soon make me tire of a game.

- Not sure about the acceleration when you keep moving left/right. It just looks like the character is running on ice which seems a bit odd.

- Maybe add a period of invulnerability when you get taken back to a way point. I was killed by the first bat and then killed very quickly again shortly after the re-spawn.

 

Sorry for the list of gripes. Its obvious a lot of effort has gone into the game to get it up to this point. I like the fact that it scrolls in all directions and when you jump the screen scrolls away from you. That's a neat effect and something I've implemented myself in the past. The graphics style sets the mood well too.

 

I hope you continue to improve and refine things as you port it to your consoles of choice.

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@GroovyBee

 

Actually, that's the kind of advice that's solid gold. Amateurs call it complaints - Savvy Amateurs call it free play testing!

 

I really appreciate peoples opinions. The console version will retain none of the drawbacks but all the feedback I've been fortunate enough to have. Mostly just the art assets will be retained in a console port. I made this game in Game Maker 5 many moons ago. The irony in easy development tools is that you end up constrained by them. By the end of development I was very tired of fighting with the Game Maker engine for control of player input, collision and CPU time management.

Edited by theloon
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When you aren't constrained by the "rules" and limits imposed by a game development package then development can be much more free form and even more of a headache in some instances.

 

If I were porting it to a console my development process would be :-

 

- Get background tiles to display (maybe the top left corner of a level).

- Get the player on the screen and interacting with the player's controls.

- Add collision detection with the tiles so the player can't walk through walls or fall through the floor.

- Get full screen scrolling (in 4 directions) going.

- Add enemies and work on their x and y clipping so they don't disappear as soon as they are out of bounds but gradually slide off the screen as it scrolls about. I think it looks neat when you can see the enemies walking around on a platform and you just see their feet moving because they are partially off screen.

- Get collision detection going between the player/baddies/shots and environment.

- Get the player changing animation sequences if you detect he's on a ladder or in the water/fire whatever.

- Get the lives and item collection system going.

- If space is tight think about RLE compressing the levels in ROM.

- Optimise and adjust as necessary.

 

Before you start coding think about your data structures and how you'll keep a list of active enemies that are currently on screen and how you'll remove them from being processed when they can no longer be seen (because they've been killed or the screen scrolled away). If you have a ton of enemies on a level in the game and you handle them all in a big loop and maybe 95% aren't on screen you'll waste quite a bit of CPU time figuring out they can't be displayed.

 

When you are dealing with consoles that have very limited resources (compared to modern day ones) you can't adopt a "developed on PC" stance because you'll soon run out of CPU or video cycles in which to do things that make the game fun.

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Thanks for the advice. That sounds like a good general structure for building any tile based engine.

 

I take it for the 7800 most of my time would be spent arranging the display list to be a tile buffer and manually masking the sprites when they reach the screen boundaries? I know this sounds like a rhetorical question given your post above - but I get the feeling the 7800 is a little different then what I'm used to.

Edited by theloon
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Thanks for the advice. That sounds like a good general structure for building any tile based engine.

 

No probs! Getting the project into manageable chunks with an end goal for each means you are more likely to finish the game in my mind.

 

I take it for the 7800 most of my time would be spent arranging the display list to be a tile buffer and manually masking the sprites when they reach the screen boundaries?

 

You get sprite clipping in X for free (within certain limits - based on screen position and width) on the 7800. However, you'll have to clip vertically in software. You also have to "cut" your sprites into MARIA zones and insert them into the Display List (DL) manually too.

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