Another Galaga thread

[CrazyChris]

21 hours ago, Gimmee99 said:

Here is a new experimental build with these changes:

 

The high score is back and working.

The Galagish logo shows in the status bar when the game is "over" and in "insert coin" mode waiting for you to press start.

There is a fake level counter in the status bar now.  It actually only counts up to 20 levels, so if you make it to level 21, the level indicator will show garbage, but there you go.

I'm on vacation for the next two weeks, so hopefully nothing bad broken here ...

gish_June14.zip 26.83 kB · 106 downloads

Thank you for continuing to develop this!

[RetroDean66]

Fun game.  Great work. I'll be looking forward to future updates on this project!

 

[oky2000]

Looks great, sounds great.

[ALEXANDER]

On 6/15/2024 at 6:50 AM, Gimmee99 said:

Hey you made it to the garbage character levels !!!!

I already revamped the level counter and did it differently.  I don't want to use two digits because it crowds the screen too much and also affects the way the high school is updated if you use that blank digit between the garbage and the first 1 in your high score here.  So instead, I now have the counter going from 1 to 8 and cycling through the 4 colors.  So you have red level 1-8, then cyan level 1-8, then yellow level 1-8, then blue level 1-8.  Then after 32 levels, you would get the garbage chacters.  I might even change each color level to go from 0-9 which would give you 40 total levels before the garbage !!!

Now that there is a level tracker, I am also thinking about doing *something* depending on the level.  Maybe something easy to start with, like if you are on a level higher than 16, instead of 400 points for hitting a boss in motion, you get 800.  Or maybe after 16 levels, if you clear the level you get a new ship.  Let me know if you have any specific ideas that would be easy to "change" using the existing game assets.

And actually now that i think about it and see how good you are at the game with current difficulty, maybe when you get to level 16, I should start TAKING THINGS AWAY !!???  Like no more double ship, and no more extra lives !!!???

😛

 

Hi dear Gimmee99. i think you hav to do the same as the arcade original version. You can. Atari can ! Cheers.

[Gimmee99]

Ok, another round of experimentation on this project.  It bothered me that instead of having to do "something" to start the game, it just starts and you have to come out firing.  So I am totally ashamed of the inefficiency of the code, but I believe i have hacked in an "insert coin" screen that at least makes you press the start button to start the game.  What should happen is this:

 

When you load the game, you should get a starfield, ship, the galagish logo in the bottom left and "insert coin" in the bottom right. 

When you press Start the game should start.

When you run out of ships, you should get "game over" in the middle of the status bar.  Pressing start should take you back to the initial "insert coin" screen, and pressing start again will start a new game.

 

It would be cool if someone could at least try this and see if that is the experience you get.  I have only tested the A8 binary, so if someone has the right key mappings for the 5200, it would be nice to know that "start" is working for that build as well.

 

@playsoft If you want to show me some sample code of how to display a graphic in the top portion of the screen, I might be able to waste some more time and actually have a big bitmap of the logo at the insert coin screen.

gish_June29_2024.zip

[RB5200]

10 hours ago, Gimmee99 said:

would be cool if someone could at least try this and see if that is the experience you get.  I have only tested the A8 binary, so if someone has the right key mappings for the 5200, it would be nice to know that "start" is working for that build as well.

It does work the way your wanting on the OE machine, but the start button could use some debuf on it. The way it is right now from the game over screen a typical normal press of the start button will trigger twice just restarting the game, without seeing the insert coin screen. 

[Gimmee99]

Another interim experimental build.  I realized while testing today that since i added the concept of the insert coin experience and the game "starting over", the high score was not persisted across games.  I didn't think I could be more ashamed of the code behind the insert coin stuff, but I have surpassed that with a giant hack for maintaining the high score across games.  In my testing, it does work for games up to 99,990.  If you go to another digit, it might work (the code tries to do the right thing), but I do not have the patience to play until i get 100,000.  Changes here should be:

 

1. The insert coin text moved to center and the high score displayed on the right at the start screen.

2. New default high score is 10000 instead of 20,000 just to make it easier to test

3. The ship icon in the status bar is now blue, like the "L" for level indicator.  It seems better to me to have all the labels be blue.

4. The high score should be preserved between games

 

 

June30.zip

[RB5200]

6 hours ago, Gimmee99 said:

In my testing, it does work for games up to 99,990.  If you go to another digit, it might work (the code tries to do the right thing), but I do not have the patience to play until i get 100,000.  Changes here should be:

 

1. The insert coin text moved to center and the high score displayed on the right at the start screen.

2. New default high score is 10000 instead of 20,000 just to make it easier to test

3. The ship icon in the status bar is now blue, like the "L" for level indicator.  It seems better to me to have all the labels be blue.

4. The high score should be preserved between games

It does preserve over 100,000 and starting a new game, good job.