Hello Fellow Devs and Announcing Meteor Swarm NES - Beta

I suppose I should introduce myself first, I am Tony from Electric Adventures, a software company I started back in the early 80's when I published titles for the original Spectravideo and MSX home computers. I also wrote articles and software for several magazines, as well as publishing the Australian MSX community news letter Micro's Gazette in the later part of the 80's.
After awakening from hibernation (well years of writing business software anyway) about five years ago and wanting to relive/revisit the 80's I resurrected most of my source code and started by making new tool sets for cross development for the original Spectravideo, MSX and Colecovision.
Three of my original games from the 80's were released by Collectorvision as EA Classics, which immediately sold out.
And last year I was asked by Collectorvision if I could make a special game for the NES i.e. the Game On Expo Championships cartridge, which contained three games, two based on Collectorvision's properties Sydney Hunter and Pedal To The Metal and a 3rd game being a conversion of one of my original games from the 80's - Meteor Swarm.
It was a fun experience and exciting challenge to not only learn 6502 but the NES architecture.
Part of my learning process involved building a tile set tool (that I may release later as I have done my editor for MSX/Coleco).

Now that I am more used to the NES architecture I plan to slowly release more games based on/inspired by my games I released for the MSX and the first one that I have just sent off for Beta testing is called Meteor Swarm.


So yes, it is (very) heavily inspired by Asteroids, but to my knowledge no game like that was ever released for the NES or Famicom.
The game is functionality complete, bar a couple of issues that I know about and of course any found by my beta testers.
So I hope to be able to announce the game ready to be ordered in the coming weeks.
The box art is currently being put together, so I will share that when it is ready.
The game will be produced by Collectorvision and come in a new plastic shell, along with a manual and cardboard box.

Hi, Tony. Cool game, and cool tool, especially!

Many years ago, I worked for a bit on an Asteroids clone for the NES but other things got in the way. If you want to check it out, download my "Sayoonara" demo and reset the console (emu?) while holding UP+B, if I remember. (It's hidden in the demo.)

http://www.chrismcovell.com/data/sayoonara.zip

Hey Tony

it looks interesting. Do you have or plan to have any video showing the game? Any plans to release it for download too?

Thanks


Paulo

Cool, love demos as they really show what you can do with a machine, when I get time I will have a look at that one, thanks.

I will be doing a video of it shortly, just need to do some more real hardware tests, so I can be sure I am happy that it is a Beta.
Regards
Tony

Thanks, well, it really can only be called an intro or a "cracktro" to be brutally honest these days.

Meteor Swarm is lookin' SLICK, man! I can't say much in terms of how it plays (since I haven't played it), but I like the way the font looks. The sprites look like they're neon in a way.

Meteor Swarm for the NES has had quite a few changes, including updated graphics to make it look more NES like and various tweaks and changes based on feedback from the Beta testers.
Couple more minor issues to sort out and we should be ready for the next round of Beta testing.
Here is a short video of me doing some play testing:
https://www.facebook.com/ElectricAdventures/videos/650514948419897/

When you hit Level 5, I jumped a bit because those asteroids look like they're out with a vengeance. There's a pretty bit difficulty spike from Level 4 to Level 5. They ate some a bunch of your lives up really quick without much warning, something I'd expect out of maybe Level 12. Is it possible to only have a few fast-moving asteroids and the rest the same slow speed? Maybe a kind of obstacle that moves across the screen horizontally or vertically where the player (o) has to either move out of the way or destroy its weakpoints (I) if moving out of the way isn't an option because of the asteroids.

I am introducing a new enemy, that appears near the end of the level (you can see the start of that in the video - code is at the very early stage for that object), that will take an increasing amount of hits to destroy based on level and will explode into four parts if you don't shoot it. This should hopefully address the underlying flaw in Asteroids game play of leaving a single meteor and just shooting UFO's until you get sick of it.
I also agree the speed goes a bit haywire on level 5, might be an issue with my maths, I'll have a look at it, thanks.