Brief analysis of Atari’s Gauntlet – Monster Movement

I am focusing my efforts on the behaviour of the monsters in my Gauntlet-esque game. I want the player to be able to move freely shooting anything that comes at him. Similarly I want the monsters to move convincingly around the level effectively trying to sniff out the player. I decided to take another closer [...]

Hoth Strike – AI modifications

The latest upload of Hoth Strike contains some AI changes. I had wanted to present a game where the player deals with varying alien behaviour. Up until last night much of the behaviour was predictable and samey so I decided to revisit it. The probe is essentially the probe from the movie. I loved the [...]

Fine tuning the action in Hoth Strike – a question of balance

There’s not much left to do on Hoth Strike before I draw a line under it and move on to my next game. But something that has been playing on my mind just lately is the question of balancing the action. I’m not a fan of implementing skill levels in games since they bring with [...]

Super Copter update – jet fighters and bombs

I have been putting some effort in to refining the Super Copter game code and playing with the concept of spawning jet fighters way off screen. The simple reason for this is that they can then attack the player from right to left. I handle all jet sprite movement in a single function and randomly [...]

Some object theory and a little sprite improvisation

With Invaders I was pretty much following the natural course of events during some research in to classic DHTML sprite manipulation. I had looked in to HTML5 and the much talked about Canvas element and it’s many benefits but I wasn’t happy that I’d explored JavaScript enough to pursue it. I started at the start [...]

Alien bomb management

A decision that I took very early on in the development of Invaders from Mars was to contol rather strictly the number of alien bombs that were on the screen at any one time. I’d figured (largely from playing Do Don Pachi and other manic shooters) that this was key to the difficulty of the [...]

Giving the enemy an identity and setting player expectations

I’ve very much come to the conclusions that the key to turning a series of well met challenges in to something that is fun lies with meeting the player’s expectations. In order to do this we of course need to set those expectations. With Invaders from Mars I decided to set expectations by identifying each [...]

Player missiles and basic alien behaviour

I put some effort in to game structuring and refining the game stats to provide a smoother and more satisfying experience. This includes allowing the player to shoot as many lasers as their finger tapping will allow. Note: Movement is with arrow keys (L and R) and lasers are Z or SPACE. You can see [...]