Bregalad wrote:
Rule #1 to make a good game : A challenge should NEVER come out of poor controls.
But where do you draw the line between poor control and inherent physics of the game? For example, Castlevania's jump that you can't control while in mid-air. Poor control, or just the physics of jumping? Technically, it's accurate.
Many games take liberty with jumping and give you mid-air control, even control over how high the jump goes
after you've left the ground, as if there are little rocket thrusters on your character or something. You may enjoy full jump control (even Mario has less jump control than other games), but this doesn't mean a game with less jump control is merely creating difficulty with "poor controls".
That said, I do think the selection of jump control is related to difficulty, because if you're forced to always give the player full jump control, then you lose many opportunities to give challenge due to the level design. By having no mid-air jump control, there are more things you can do with level design that are challenging.
That's not to say that there aren't games with poor control. It's not that they offer no mid-air control (some do, and are still poor); it's that the physics introduce too much variation that you have little control over, or your movement is delayed or choppy. As long as a control scheme is predictable and puts you in control of the variation, and doesn't have odd behaviors, the player can learn to be in full control.
To take it to ane extreme, you could argue that all jumping is just poor controls; the real controls should be independent X/Y movement of your character, as if it were an overhead game. While silly, it illustrates the continuum of the amount of control you have, and that there isn't just one point that is correct and the others "poor control".
(mods, split the above off as a separate topic if necessary)
never-obsolete wrote:
i do plan to put music and sound fx into the game. i had a guy lined up to do the music/music engine, but haven't heard from him in awhile. looks like i'm just gonna have to sit down and learn how to use the APU and compose some music.
Isn't the music really simple? Shouldn't be hard to lift from the original code, or just do by ear with a custom music driver. Copyright wouldn't be any more an issue than it already is, since (I'm assuming) you've copied the graphics and game play from the original.
EDIT: Ahhh, it had no music (
YouTube clip). Has anyone reverse-engineered the sound engine, or would it make more sense to just examine recordings of the sound effects to reproduce the sounds? I might like to take a crack at making exact reproductions on the NES.
