Space Bacon: When Pigs Fly

[+atari2600land]

I made this fixed (you can move up & down, though.) space shooter game with Batari Basic. What do you guys think?

spacebaconv8a.bin

[vdub_bobby]

Cool. Very polished for a bB game.

 

Things I liked:

-Music! Very nice.

-Sounds were also nice.

-Pig sprite is nicely done.

-Responsive controls.

-No graphic/sound/control glitches that I saw.

-Got more difficult.

 

Things I would change:

-Make the difficulty ramp up a little faster at the beginning, and ramp more smoothly.

-Difficulty plateau's at 30 points. Needs to keep getting harder, or at least plateau at a much harder level.

-Add variety to the pigs' movements - vary the angles that they bounce at.

-You should use fractional positioning for the pig so that you can increase his speed more smoothly and so that you have more options for angles. I'd ramp the difficulty every 5 points, rather than 10, and have many more difficulty levels. It should really only stop ramping at an almost impossible difficulty - i.e., the pigs move right to left at a varying 2-3 pixels/frame and move vertically at a varying 0-3 pixels per frame - and their should be fractional steps in those ranges (i.e., one pig moves at 2.25 pixels/frame horizontally and 1.25 pixels/frame vertically, the next at 1 pixel/frame horiz. and 3 pixels/frame vertically, etc.)

-Make the player's shot wider.

-allow the player to start/restart a game with the firebutton

-Make it possible to return to the title screen?

-Change the scoring. Having a six-digit score that increases by 1 each time is depressing. Make each pig worth 100, or worth more depending on either (a) how soon after they appear you hit them or (b) how close to you they are when you hit them.

-Have a life indicator.

-More sprite variety.

 

Overall, this game is pretty fun and very polished - but, like many bBASIC games, its gameplay is very shallow. IMO games with shallow gameplay are OK (see Kaboom! for one very popular game with very shallow gameplay) but they need to get hard quickly. Boredom can set in quickly when there isn't much challenge...

 

Also: what's the backstory here? Why is a yellow blob shooting floating pigs with a peashooter while flying extremely quickly through a tunnel, while a floating blue blob stays just ahead, ever out of reach? And why can the pig fly through the walls and you can't? Is it a ghost pig?

Edited September 7, 2006 by vdub_bobby

[+atari2600land]

Thanks for the compliments, vdub_bobby. In answer to a few questions, the blue blob is the life meter. Each shade of blue is a life. You're in a cave on the moon and you're exploring it when all of a sudden, evil, flying alien pigs come at you.

Edited September 7, 2006 by atari2600land

[vdub_bobby]

Thanks for the compliments, vdub_bobby. In answer to a few questions, the blue blob is the life meter. Each shade of blue is a life. You're in a cave on the moon and you're exploring it when all of a sudden, evil, flying alien pigs come at you.

Thanks for the answers!

 

Using different colors to represent the number of lives (or hits, or whatever) left is not a good idea, IMO - too hard to tell at a glance how many lives/hits/whatevers you have left. Plus, it'd be much more intuitive, and clear, if the life meter was below the playing area rather than right in the middle of it.

[pocketmego]

I made this fixed (you can move up & down, though.) space shooter game with Batari Basic. What do you guys think?

 

Good job. I like that it gets faster and faster. However, it does need a shark.

 

That was a term that the Activision guys used when they first made fishing derby and it was missing just one element to make it a perfect game. You need to add some sort of random danger to the player other than the pigs to make this harder, or its just goign to be about keeping score.

 

Think of the ahark in fishing derby that eats the fish you are trying to catch. Or the Spider in Centipede, or the saucer in Asteroids.

 

Other than that though, you did a great job with this.

 

-Ray

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Some animations would be nice.

[godzillajoe]

It's definitely missing a "shark" as gameplay becomes rather tedious after a few minutes. Sorry, don't mean to discourage any homebrewers but it does.

 

I would also recommend changing the player shot sound to something more gun-like

 

Currently if you hold down the fire button the "beep....beep....beep." sounds like you're hooked up to monitors in a hospital

 

And yeah, change up the pig movements a bit. Or add another pig or a cow or a chicken or something that you have to grab every once in a while or else you lose a life. It's way too easy right now.

 

To say one positive thing, I liked the pig graphics.