Friday, June 13, 2008

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!!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Played it on WinVice 1.22.

Did not find any bugs, or crashes.

Looks fantastic!

Not getting any music with default Plus4 sound chip, even though it says its on, can hear the sound effects fine.

If I turn on the SID cartridge I get music (and sound effects).


Could the ship move a bit faster to start with, found it difficult to avoid waveforms even when I knew they were coming.

Need at least another bullet to start with, 3 instead of 2, other wise your a sitting duck if you miss.

Its incredibly difficult to pick up the coins, especially if the attack wave is on the bottom 1/4 of the screen.

Maybe make the coins jump higher.

Also the first big wave of 8 ships you come across only give out 1 coin?! For all that effort with 2 bullets.

Die and you loose all your coins, most unfair - along with a weapons power-up :-(

Have great difficulty on collecting coins before the energy bar goes red.
Warning noise before it does? And when your weapon down grades?
Audio/Visual indication before your about to die.
Always getting thrown back to the beginning of the level (doh!).

Would be nice to know which ships are carrying coins, or when a ship is (virtually) indestructible (the huge vertical wave that attacks shortly after the turrets section).


Visual and audio feed back when your colliding with the enemy - but need the speed to avoid them in the first place!

Didn't make it to end of level monster, found it much to hard - even with 6 bullets the ships later on just didn't want to die.

It can be very difficult to see the turret bullets as they can shoot through the background at you (but you cant). Also on some of the diagonals the turret bullets wobble a lot (seems like more than they should).

Spotted that the coin meter jumped more than a single coin, but could not replicate.

Slight wobbly raster for the control panel (when you die for example). May just blank the screen?

Enjoyed playing it, fantastic bit of work but the difficulty need sorting out or you'll end up with something like IO (WAY to hard to play).

Best of luck, I hope you find this feed back useful.

Fantastic title logo.

Regards,
Woz.

Question:
What is the exact difference between the TG-16 and the PC Engine? You write as if they are completely different beasts?

Anonymous said...

No no noooo! Don't use WinVice +4! :D NO!
Well we blasted the boss in about 20'-25' of training...

Anonymous said...

Playing in YAPE and everything seems a happy bunny; the game looks and sounds brutal and now i'm going to be slightly depressed that there'll be another wait before i get to play more of it!

As controls go, i'm perfectly happy with the ship speed and initial power, but i do agree with anonymous there that the coins could be given a bit more upwards momentum to make them a little easier to catch; at the moment the nose of the ship almost needs to be ploughing into the nasties and, whilst i do sometimes play parts of shoot 'em ups that way, it's unnerving having to do it all the time!

The difficulty isn't too far off the mark as far as i'm concerned... which possibly means it needs gearing down a little, i can finish Io on a single life. =-)

Anonymous said...

Mike, got another little bug, it's saturday, you're not yet online and my memory might be erased by aliens, hence I write it there.

Quitting the game when your ship has just been destroyed, still keeps up the fadeout counter. Due to this, pressing space, the game has to complete a fading as first instance, then it regularly fadein and starts.

Mike said...

okay theres 2 coin sizes. When you shoot a big wave, you get a large coin, othertimes you get a small one. This is why the coin meter can JUMP and why you WANT to shoot these larger waves!

There is no TED music, only SID.

Im not a fan of moving faster, but we'll look at it again..

2 bullets at the start is fine, but we can certainly look to smooth things out to make it easier.

Really? I found picking up coins very easy...Oh well... we'll look at that.

We can make it so you lose most of your coins I guess - but not all.

You lose 2 weapon powers on you death, which seemed okay - we'll see what others say.

You now get a scraping noise when you hit something.

In the full game, we have MANY baddie sprites, so it will be easier to tell which ones are harder to shoot. In this demo we only used 1 shape, so its pretty hard. I'll look at stopping the animaion on the hard ones to simulate the final game a little better.

BAD raster in the emulator, works fine on Yape and the real machine.

TG16 and PCEngine were the same machine, one in Japan, one in U.S.A.