10-18-2022, 05:16 PM
My Son was showing me what a lot of the younger folks are playing these days. A lot of "bullet hell" designs, meaning you just hold a button or set up an AI to constantly spray bullets in any given direction, you know, like my avatar! 
Mark mentioned random luck when firing. It's pretty much that way when I play, but when my Son plays, he can actually target ships and do so without a great deal of moving round. Well then again, he wins a lot of gaming contests, so he is really good as a player. I'm happy to just survive level 3-3.
This was the first project I coded as an "original" game. ASCII Invaders, the game I coded last Halloween, was based on Space Invaders. Other games I coded in the past (1980) were Monopoly, chess, Wheel of Fortune, Password, and Card Sharks (The game show was called Sharks, not Sharps, incidentally). These I made before the big game companies did the same, only in full graphics. Detailed ASCII is neat, but graphics games, of course, sell better. Those first graphics games were distributed on CD-ROM, or cassette plugins made for systems like Atari.
Well I think I'm about to the point where the game is the game, meaning adding much of anything else wouldn't make much of a difference. For fun, I've thought about coding shields, making the last alien ship bullet attack the Guardian, regaining points if you shoot an alien ship with abductees, before it exits the screen, respawing a destroyed alien ship if a ship with abductees exits the screen, modifying the loss of thruster power a bit, and adding stabilizers so if explosions are too close, the ship is unable to be stopped in space. Anyway, mostly fun to code but probably no net positive effect of the playing experience. At some point adding too much is too much. Space Invaders was very simple, and was even fun without three shields and a mother ship. My hats off to the folks who thought up games like that, back in the day!
Pete
Mark mentioned random luck when firing. It's pretty much that way when I play, but when my Son plays, he can actually target ships and do so without a great deal of moving round. Well then again, he wins a lot of gaming contests, so he is really good as a player. I'm happy to just survive level 3-3.
This was the first project I coded as an "original" game. ASCII Invaders, the game I coded last Halloween, was based on Space Invaders. Other games I coded in the past (1980) were Monopoly, chess, Wheel of Fortune, Password, and Card Sharks (The game show was called Sharks, not Sharps, incidentally). These I made before the big game companies did the same, only in full graphics. Detailed ASCII is neat, but graphics games, of course, sell better. Those first graphics games were distributed on CD-ROM, or cassette plugins made for systems like Atari.
Well I think I'm about to the point where the game is the game, meaning adding much of anything else wouldn't make much of a difference. For fun, I've thought about coding shields, making the last alien ship bullet attack the Guardian, regaining points if you shoot an alien ship with abductees, before it exits the screen, respawing a destroyed alien ship if a ship with abductees exits the screen, modifying the loss of thruster power a bit, and adding stabilizers so if explosions are too close, the ship is unable to be stopped in space. Anyway, mostly fun to code but probably no net positive effect of the playing experience. At some point adding too much is too much. Space Invaders was very simple, and was even fun without three shields and a mother ship. My hats off to the folks who thought up games like that, back in the day!
Pete