Espozo wrote:
You're in for a surprise if you think R-Type is easy...
This. R-Type routinely gets pegged as the HARDEST in the genre. Those little speed powerups, the "bits" that sit above and below your ship, and the force powerups, you NEED those. I've talked to people who say Gradius is more lenient than R-Type on recovery after death. Personally I think it's a cruel joke that either of these games give you more than one life. But don't get me wrong, I frickin' love them.
One thing that makes R-Type really hard is that is has different paths which require memorization, and a lot of the paths lead to guaranteed death. So you have to get to level 6 first, and then, you have to play that level enough times to memorize exactly how to go in it. Now you can look online. As a kid, I had to get good enough to get to that level, and spend the time getting there before I even get a crack at figuring out how to get further in it.
DRW wrote:
darryl.revok wrote:
I came across Bird Week a couple months ago and thought it was cute and simple, but I didn't play it long enough to know that it looped.
Isn't this just one and the same level anyway?
From what I played, about three or four levels, every one was different. Every level that I played introduced new enemies to try and prevent you from feeding your chicks.
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To be honest, that's just what I assumed from watching the game. I haven't actually played "R-Type". But at least you have a decent speed, so if you can manage to dodge everything, you can maybe stay alive. In "Gradius", it looks like it's physically impossible to play the game without powerups. But either way, if I had to choose between the two, I would take "R-Type". Its ship also looks better.
You start out pretty slow in R-Type actually, and increasing your speed is reliant on picking up speed powerups in predetermined locations. The fact that Gradius lets you choose when to get speed make it a little easier to me, in that respect. With Gradius, you've got your full speed less than a minute into the game. It's been a while since I've played R-Type, but there's only one, maybe two speed powerups per level.
R-Type made me fall in love with the genre. There are a lot of reasons to love the game. But make no mistake, R-Type is to shooters as Ghosts n Goblins is to platformers. R-Type is to shooters as Battletoads is to beat-em-ups. Don't listen to AVGN when he says Silver Surfer is harder. He is good at platformers but sucks at shooters.
As the popular voice for retro gaming, I feel like he kind of hurts the popularity of an already under-appreciated genre by downplaying them so hard.
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Looks pretty nice. But you should be cautious with using too many frames of animation. For walking, this doesn't matter, but for attacks and ducking, the character can be really sloppy when you don't implement a decent speed. For my taste, "Moon Crystal" doesn't play tightly enough. The controls always have a lag due to the detailed animations.
In my game, jumping, ducking and attacking will be one animation frame each, so that you have full control of the character. Also, when you start moving, she will move immediately.
You bring up some really good points. What I don't want to do is make a game that feels like Prince of Persia or Flashback. Not that those are bad games, they're just not the one I'm hoping to make. However, I do want my character to have a balance between the two, and I'm going to have to do a lot of testing for that. I might have to drop some frames or just speed them up if I have enough cycles to do so. I want my character to have a sense of weight, and for that, little delays at times are necessary. As much as I love the games, Mega Man has no sense of weight because he can turn on a dime at any time. Mario has more because he has inertia and he skids and things like that. What I'm hoping to shoot for honestly is a feel a little similar to Smash Bros. It's very fast and responsive, yet your character has weight and delays in their attacks and fast turns. Some characters have longer delays before an attack hits and some have longer delays after their attacks hit. I never studied the game the way pros do, so somebody could correct me if I'm wrong, but I felt like the characters Captain Falco and Fox would attack almost immediately but leave a bigger window for getting hit after the attack, and my preferred character, Marth, was a little more split in the middle. I want it to be a little less like the feel of something like Ninja Gaiden where you can just swipe swipe swipe swipe and more in a sense that you have to actually time when your opponent will be in range with the amount of time it takes for you to swing their sword at them. Like I said, it will take a lot of balancing, and too much will make it feel like Moon Crystal. I do want it faster than that, but not like, standard action platformer fast, if that makes sense.
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Let me give you a hint: Before you spend too much time on the graphics, try to implement the game to a decent amount. If my colleague hadn't agreed to draw me everything, I wouldn't have used anything but placeholders until 90 % of the game was playable.
So far, I've uploaded almost all of the graphics that I did, before I went on to coding. I was nervous about doing the programming at first, maybe because the intimidating scope of the documents on the subject, but after I started I'm actually really enjoying it. I need a little bit of graphic content to refine the gameplay elements I described above, but I'm going to be building the engine before I do much more graphic-wise. So far I set up an animation engine that I need to tweak on a bit and a collision routine that I feel is pretty decent. Next I'm going to do some work on a background/scrolling engine, background collision detection, and after that, I think I'll be ready to start putting the pieces together and adding real player controls. Once that's done I'll finish the animations for the main character and add her full move set. Then I want to add one enemy, do the logic and AI for him, and it's back to programming until I have the bulk of the engine done.
That's my game plan anyway. (unintentional pun alert) If I ever need a break from coding I could switch to making some graphics or vice versa.
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Will the game be the size of "Zelda" or more "Gauntlet"? Because if it's your first game, maybe don't try to set a too high goal.
For example, my game is actually doable: Five levels with a good amount of randomly generated level contents. The game will be around the size and complexity of "Kung Fu". And the only visual trick that I implement is parallax scrolling because I really like that.
But I wouldn't try, for example, to program the next "Castlevania" for my first game.
Being a side-scroller, I'm going to say I want it to be more or less the size of
Metroid. I know I'm going to catch flak for setting my sights too high, but I think it's doable with a lot of work. It looks to me like the biggest hurdle is being willing to spend years working on ONE thing. I'm just breaking it up into little chunks. Instead of like, learning to do some animations and some backgrounds and some controls, and putting all of those into a little project, I'm just doing those things one at a time and making individual routines that will go into a bigger program. By the time I do the later ones, I'll probably need to redo the earlier ones with new tricks I learned, and that's fine. All that energy will be going toward one goal though. I can have a playable demo without having an entire game, and that's my small first project, but even after the framework is up it will probably be another year creating the content. Does that sound feasible? Maybe not, I don't know, but that's what I've been shooting for.
Do you have anything from your game posted? I'd love to see it.