XeO3: changes.....

I've been playing with the speed of the ship and its really is just too fast if I double it. It makes it more of a dash/avoid style game which isn't what I want. The real problem I guess is that I can't just speed it up a little since a multi colour sprite must rest on 2 pixel boundarys.

Luca has just finished playing the sped up version and while he enjoyed it, he thought it was way too easy - as did I. All the paths have been built for a slow moving ship, and speeding it up pretty much spoils everything.

What we could do is add a powerup that speeds your ship up for 30 seconds or so, which means you get the benifit of it, but doesn't ruin the game

I'm still really surprised that everyone finds it too hard, as all the games people go on about; I'm stinking at! I think its just practice everyones all needing. Thing is, if its too easy then everyone will just finish it too quidckly and get no long term enjoyment from it.

Thats the thing about trying to balance the game with the feedback I get, everyone playing it wants to finish it and in some respect wants it as easy as possible so they can do it pretty quickly. But theres no point in that. You need a game thats challenging and does make you scream, but that you'll come back for more too. In this respect I think it has to be harder than everyone's wanting, but not so hard that theres no chance in reaching the end.

Blood Money on the C64 was hard, way too hard. While I did manage to pass each wave individually, I couldn't do a whole level. I think the trick here is to make sure I can pass at least level 1 and 2 (since I really am crap at these games), then make the later ones harder; perhaops getting someone much better to actually playtest it and make sure its possible.

So on Friday I'll release a new version, but the ship won't speed up, that'll come when we add power ups again. I know this won't be particually well recieved, particually since I dont intend to add restart points either but hay ho...

As to restart points.... The scripting makes this hard since you have to fastforward through it (much like the debug system does) and its pretty nasty to say the least. I also think the amount of shield you have means you're actually pretty well protected! You can get hit a LOT before your thrown back to the start! Many games need the restart because if you get hit by a single bullet your dead! We don't. Also since we let you keep most of your weapons, you have the chance to actually build up even more next time around so when you get to the place you died, you should have more shields and weapons this time around!

Still... thats the theory, so for these 2 things I'm at least partially sticking to my guns. I will allow a temporary speed boost, but not permanent. I just find games where you fly around at great speed too hard and frantic, and thats not what I'm trying to make.


Edit: At the end of the day, it has to be a game I enjoy making and playing, and I don't agree with the restart points as I believe you would HAVE to lose all your weapons and coins and I hate that! Mid way through a level with a pea shooter is nuts! You might have 10 lives but they'll all go when you restart with a crap weapon. If you start from the begining, then I feel you can keep most of the goodies you have as you've been punished enough.

XeO3: Improvements

So here we go again....

• I've made some of the harder baddies easier to kill


• I've added the drift to the coin and made the arc slightly higher (although as Luca's aready pointed out, it still has to get off screen pretty quickly!)


• I've added the scraping sound as you get hit.


• In the final game, there will be a sheild recharge pickup, and it'll get recharged at the start of each level.


• I'm still unconvinced about moving the ship faster....


• I've made the harder baddies a static frame so you can tell they're hard to kill. This will chance in the final game to a different baddie graphic so each TYPE will have its own strengths.

We will release an update in a few days to see what you all think about the improvements, and all going well, we'll plow on with the actual game.

I also just spotted a worrying bug in visual SourceSafe. It would just refuse to check in a modified file for some reason! I'd check out a file, change it, and then check it back in; but the file wouldn't actually change! This seems to have affected 2 files. My turret source file, and the front end logo characterset. I've now managed to fix them both without losing anything, but thats a worrying turn of events!

XeO3: First bits of feedback.

The biggest agreed one was that it you need a sound when being hit, or when you hit a wall, the next is people think its just too hard. After that it gets a little more generic with no real consensis. Being thrown back to the start of the level seems to be an issue and there also appears to be the need to move a little quicker. So lets address some of these...

You now get a sound when being hit, or when hitting a wall. I have to use sound effects sparingly as the TED sound system is fragile, this means I cant go overboard on different sounds for various events..

I'll tweak the harder baddies and see if that helps

I'm not a big fan of restart points, and if you did I would have to punish you more for diying. Currently you dont lose all you weapons, I think if you restarted, you should. I don't really like that. I could just bring the player back on screen at the same point, but again, you'd have to lose all your weapons or it would just be too easy.

Speed... This is a tricky one. Because we're software sprites in MCM, I have to double the speed of the ship (not just move it a little), and that might mean you miss bullets. But we can certainly look at it - possibly as a power up.


Remember there are 2 coin sizes. Small ones fall from individual baddies, and larger ones from groups of baddies. This means shooting a whole wave will sometimes drop a large coin and you get more of the coin bar filled at once! Currently I think theres too many falling early on, but we'll see how that works out...

2 bullets at the start should be fine, particually as you can power up really quickly.

Folk are finding it tricky to pick up coins. This is a bit of a surprise, but I'll look to make the arc bigger to give you more time.

Also remember that in the final game theres lots of different baddie types, and these will dictate how hard it is to kill. This means it'll be easier to spot those harder aliens. But for now, I'll change the animations a little to make them more obvious.

The rasters are fine on the real machine... if it wobbles, its the emulator your running on! :)

Keep the feedback coming please, if you have nothing to say about it - then say that! We need to know that too! We'll do updates to the demo until its playing better, then we can progress to the real game again.

I'm also very interested in hearing from people that are playing with the scripting language and how your finding it.

XeO3: ALPHA!!!!

Well, its time!! You can find the link on the right, go get it, play it, think about it... then let us know what you think!

I've just recieved my PCEngine FLASH card! With this I can write code and download it to a real machine! Very cool! I'll need to update my assembler once more to allow for the extra custom operands, but thats fairly simple. I love this machine, its sooo quick compared to a C64, and its stacks of characters AND sprites! coool!!

XeO3: Final - FINAL - cleanup!

Well theres always SOMETHING left to do isn't there!

I've added pause and quit keys (Shift-Lock and Escape respectivly).
I now clear the screen on quit.
I've now made the front end options work.
I added an explosion sound when the player dies.
I kill sound effects when you quit. (kind of)
I fixed a bug where when you quit with bullets flying, it wasn't being reset.

Thats about it.... A couple of folk invloved have recieved test versions and they seem to be more or less happy, and with these changes, so are we....pretty much :)

I plays reasonably well I think, but we'll see what everyone else thinks about it when they get a chance to play with it over the weekend.

XeO3: Final cleanup!

I was looking through the game and spotted a couple of things I want to try and fix tonight - pretty minor, but it would still be nice to fix them for the demo. Once I've done that, I'll get a package ready for Luca to post tomorrow night (whenever we're both home and ready).

However... I was thinking.... IF I really wanted to... I could probably speed the game up quite a bit. For example: The engine redraws the screen every frame - this is slow. It DOES mean I dont have to save+replace stuff, but it would be much quicker to slowly redraw a screen over several frames, THEN flip. I blit the screen each frame because I wanted to have large character sprites that cover large areas of the screen - but that would be too slow to replace. However, due to memory we've dropped that idea. (The source is still there so someone else can play with it!)

So... lets look at HOW you could speed it up.

If when drawing sprites I did collision of baddie sprites to bullets the same way as I do the player to the background, then I could remove the N*N loop I have which does bounding box checks. I could also draw a lot more bullets! (Dan did this in Armalyte, and I suspect its common practise with C64 shooters).

Next.. If I did a Save/Replace system for bullets and sprites I wouldn't have to redraw the screen. (this would save a large screen buffer anyway).

That way I only ever copy a couple of lines a frame rather than 21!! That would be a massive saving, possibly freeing up enough time to draw another couple of sprites! (which would make 12!) OR (more likely) allow drawing of more complex weapons!

Now... I could do this... But I think we have finally passed the point where major changes are allowed, otherwise we'd NEVER finish! If I ever do an XeO3-II, then I might alter some ideas.

Still while I'm talking about that.. After the Plus4 version, I'll finish the C64 one (possibly taking some of the above ideas on board), and then do a TG16 and PCEngine version, as I love BOTH those machines! Since they are both basically 6502, I dont expect them to take very long and I might be able to move to other platforms... like the Amiga/ST.

Still...its taken long enough to get here, so I'll worry about all this later!

XeO3: Almost there!!!!

I've ironed our the remaining issues, and Luca is reasonably pleased with the level layout. We've also tweaked a few graphical things and tweaked the BOSS's nose.

I wouldn't get too excited about killing the BOSS though... it'll just restart :)

So, all going well, and barring any major issues the demo + scripting test will be released on FRIDAY NIGHT! (Friday the 13th!)

PLEASE remember to give feed back on one of the many forums (C64, Plus4, spectrum etc..)

XeO3: An interesting side effect....

Now that its all working, it appears to be quite a bit harder.... Closer inspection shows that the changes to the bullet collision have actually made it tougher! This is because coins can now be hit! So its pretty tough to shoot a line of aliens if they all drop coins, and means you really need to shoot it close to you, and then quickly pick up the coin so you can shoot the next one in line!

This is pretty hard, particually if your being hammered from all sides by turrets! I could change it now, but I think I'll wait and see what the feed back is. Of course, the temptation of gamers it to make it reasonably easy so they can finish it, so all comments will have to be taken with a pinch of salt, but lets see what you all say.

XeO3: At LAST!!!

Well, its offical....I'm a prat. Let the word go forth.... I am a moron. Yes, I've fixed my bug, and wouldn't you know it... it was the change I made a few hours before when altering the collision flags. I was simply branching to the wrong location when I detected a NOSHOOT flag. What a prat.

Oh well... Debug code now removed and we're back on track! Now I just need to finish this level off, and build a scripting framework.... almost there!

*sigh* oh well at least its fixed, but I still feel like a twat.

XeO3: I knew it!!!

Oh well... I knew it was going to smoothly... I've discovered a bug thats gonna delay things until I manage to find and fix it. Shooting at the boss you eventually stop firing for some reason. No idea why, but it looks like your bullet counter goes negative, and then is unable to fire any more. No idea why - theres only 2 places which reduce the counters, and I cant see how this is possible - fek.