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Ms. Galactopus - Complete!(?)


KaeruYojimbo

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Ms. Galactopus sat at home, waiting for her husband to return from earth with food for their children (and by food I mean delicious humans). Earth is very far from Galactopia, and they have A LOT of children, so she knew the wait would be long. But this has been too long. Something happened to her husband on earth, and now she's going there to find out what.

Given our history with Galactopuses, we aren't going to let another one just casually stroll into our atmosphere. We've built a defense shield around the entire planet and stationed a squadron of our best fighter pilots around the perimeter. As one of those pilots, your mission is to drive Ms. Galactopus away from earth with you laser blasts. Keep an eye on her babies. They can't hurt your ship, but they weaken the defense shield if they collide with it. Shield strength is indicated by the color of the shield (darker = stronger). If a baby breaks through, it's GAME OVER!

 

April 7 2019: Posted the FINAL version of the game (barring any bugs that need to be fixed).

Controls:

Use the left joystick to move your ship left and right. Press the button to fire a laser blast.

Left Difficulty B: Pressing the button resets your shot.
Left Difficulty A: You must wait for your shot to clear the screen before firing again.

Right Difficulty B: Your shot can destroy a baby even if it is overlapping your ship.
Right Difficulty A: Shots only harm babies if they are higher than your ship.

Color/BW: Pauses game.

post-5573-0-07739600-1545844372_thumb.png

msgalactopus20190111.bin

msgalactopus-FINAL.bin

msgalactopus-FIX2.bin

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It's been a few months, but I'm back to work on Ms. Galactopus. Most of the changes since the last post are under the hood, but I did add a death scene for Ms. G and fixed the animation of the babies. Hopefully I'll be able to focus on the game again and keep updating regularly.

msgalactopus20170526.bin

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I guess it depends on how you want to play. You can just blast away, but if you want a good score, you need to focus on Ms. G.

 

Each level has a set number of babies worth 15 points each. If you kill all of them, you get a bonus of 25 points per level of shield remaining.

 

But, if you kill Ms. G, your bonus is 25 x the number of babies left x the level of shield left and you replenish a level of shield of you have less than the max.

 

So it still pays to go after Ms. G rather than the babies. It might even be a little harder this way since it's possible to accidentally take out a baby still at the top of the screen and cost yourself bonus points.

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The gameplay is different. I mean, it's still a vertical shooter with a giant space octopus at the top of the screen, but other than that it's different. I haven't had as much time to work on it as I would like, but I have every intention of finishing it at some point.

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I tried the "b" ROM the other night. It was quite a fun game until I let one of the baby octopi hit the ground while I was shooting the mom. It froze when the baby hit the ground. I'll play it some more and if it happens again, I'll take a pic of the screen. So far it's a really fun title and I like shooting the babies.

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It was quite a fun game until I let one of the baby octopi hit the ground while I was shooting the mom. It froze when the baby hit the ground. I'll play it some more and if it happens again, I'll take a pic of the screen.

 

The game freezes when a baby makes it past and there's no shield left, so that's probably what happened. I'll add a lot of flashing colors to the next update as a stand in until I do a real game over sequence.

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The game freezes when a baby makes it past and there's no shield left, so that's probably what happened. I'll add a lot of flashing colors to the next update as a stand in until I do a real game over sequence.

The freeze is a bit of a pain playing on Harmony since all joystick and console inputs are frozen, I gotta power off the Atari and find the ROM again in the menu. But I understand you plan to implement a Game Over to fix this.

 

Another suggestion, since the bullets travel so slowly and there's only one onscreen at a time, sometimes I gotta shoot that baby NOW before it hits bottom. Perhaps a reset function on the one bullet would help, ie pressing fire again resets the location of the bullet to the end of your gun. I seen some Atari games that do this, and once you tame the urge to button mash, it can be quite resourceful to fire a second bullet once you are sure the first will miss it's target. Having one bullet onscreen at a time makes firing very strategic in this game, but perhaps a difficulty switch could decide whether to reset the bullet or wait it out.

 

This gameplay is quite clever and solid as is. Another addend that would make this game more awesome: paaaddlessss! :grin:

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Another suggestion, since the bullets travel so slowly and there's only one onscreen at a time, sometimes I gotta shoot that baby NOW before it hits bottom. Perhaps a reset function on the one bullet would help, ie pressing fire again resets the location of the bullet to the end of your gun. I seen some Atari games that do this, and once you tame the urge to button mash, it can be quite resourceful to fire a second bullet once you are sure the first will miss it's target. Having one bullet onscreen at a time makes firing very strategic in this game, but perhaps a difficulty switch could decide whether to reset the bullet or wait it out.

I considered resetting missiles (I've always called them Gorf missiles. I don't know if Gorf was the first game to use them, but it's the game I associate most with them.) but decided against it. I like the idea of making it an option with the difficulty switch though.

 

paaaddlessss!

The batari basic multisprite kernel doesn't have support for paddles, so even if I wanted to include paddle control I couldn't. I know people go apesh*t over paddles for side-to-side shooters, but I think it upsets the gameplay balance too much unless it's something like Astrosmash or maybe Spider Fighter.

Edited by KaeruYojimbo
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