I got some more time to sit down and work seriously for hours at a time on Hangly Plus. I had a couple days of vacation I took the past couple days so I pluged away at it. I am hoping I can finish it soon. Got quite a bit done getting rid of a number of bugs (or things that were not addressed yet in some cases).
<a href="http://imageshack.us"><img src="http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/7130/hangly3screenszk5.jpg" border="0" alt="Image Hosted by ImageShack.us"/></a><br/>I have two new mazes I made up. (3rd one is the original hangly maze again…only blue). Banging out a maze is the easy part really. I have all the pieces ready to go, so it doesn't take long.So new features/fixes…Energizers are random now like Pac-Man Plus…eating one can turn all four ghosts blue…or only 3 of 4, or it could blank out the maze. (I may make 4 more for a blanked out maze and 3 of 4 ghosts blue. Would be pretty quick to do).Eating the center prize now acts like an energizer (like in Pac-Man Plus). The ghosts turn invisible untill the time they would be flashing blue/white and scores double points…400, 800, 1600, 3200 (Still need to add the 3200…just need to plop the sprite in)Previously the ghosts were turning blue again exiting the pen if the energizer was playing. Fixed it now. They only turn blue in the pen if they were not nailed yet.All mazes have 4 "safe zones" now like the original Pac-Man games and hacks. Some could not be placed "exactly" where they normaly are but are close as posible, depending on the maze.Ghosts slow down in the longer tunnels. (Actually in the real Hangly Man the ghosts would slow down passing over the area where the original tunnel "used" to extend to. The tiny openings at the top and bottom had no difference in speed from what I saw. Fixed the scoring again on the ghosts. Score 200,400,800,1600 normal. I tweaked something putting something in and score only increased if the ghosts were piled up when you nailed em, or they would revert back to 200. Slowed down the ghosts more when they are blue..so they are easier to catch. The eyes going back to the pen and turning back into monsters works fine on the graphics. There is a rare bug of it playing the "eyes" sound and "energizer" at the same time. Still tracking it down. Orange I need to tweak again. I was "half" right from what I saw. Orange does chase you to a point and then backs off, but from what I can tell, it tries to always back off to the bottom-left if posible…meaing it is trying to get to his corner briefly. Other various tweaks correcting minor stuff has been done. In other news I have been hanging out on an old site I used to go to a bit. http://www.emuchrist.org I was looking around in the forums and saw they have an "on-line arcade". I kinda went nuts in there for a few days going for all the high scores. 46 trophys so far. I told them alot of the games were pretty bad. (In the sense of remakes not being very close to the originals.) I was playing the online Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. Yeash, Ms. Pac-Man was BAD! I wrote someone there about maybe doing more accurate games for download that can send the high score up. I sent him what I had done on Hangly Plus so far, and he seems up for the idea. Thinking about it, I am probably going to do some more "retro" style games for the site (time permiting) where you can send the high score some way. Most of the games there had one problem or another.They would be FAR too easy…so getting a high score is only a matter of how much boredom you could endure.Some would flat out try to "cheat". Galagon (A Galaga spin off) had red enemys that moved so erraticly going in formation in later stages it litterly looked like they were trying to stab you. The Donkey Kong game (One whole level…over and over)…you are going along fine and then a barrel glitch causes a barel to apear right on top of your guy at the start of a level, killing any remaing lives.Some games had a bug you could exploit the hell out of for tons of points. Bubble Bobble was great for that on the site. Jump into the walls and launch bubbles rapid fire getting 10 pts a piece poping them. Thousands of extra points a level.The video poker game drove me insane! Not trying to win a hand….Just trying to place a fricking bet large enough to get the high score on say 2 pair or 3 of a kind. I thought I was playing Track N' Field I as smashing the mouse button so many times rapid fire for like a minute a bet or so.I like the way this Hangly thing is coming together. Mostly done, and very playable already. Debating on adding intermissions…would add something new if I did. The way this one turned out, I think I will be doing more "retro-remakes" for EC if they give it the green light. (Sounds like they are game). So I don't know if some of my future stuff would wind up here. May be like… awww, thats old, or ,thats simple…. Just want to make some more accurate "oldies". Looking at many of the online versions (with hi-score support), it can't be that hard.
I just did a remake of Armor battle.Will Hangly have 2player alternate or co op,cut scenes and patterns?
I am probably going to stick with 1 player. I have plans of trying to make this kind of "on-line" for another site (well, sending the hi-scores up anyway…gotta talk to someone running the site what I need to do there.) I want to put in intermisions at the ussual points. (after second maze, fifth, ninth…etc). As far as patterns, you may be able to run "parts" of patterns but I think it would break down for that stratagey overall. The mazes change (still need to bang out the fourth maze. Last one I will put in so it will have a Ms. Pac-Man style order to it.) If you learn a patern for one maze, it would soon change. Other things that would break down the pattern stratagy are the energizers and the center prizes.
They will have different blue times like the original Pac-Man but since the energizers will have a "random" effect, all the ghosts may turn blue, or any one of the four may stay normal which means the non-blue ghost would act different and go somewhere else. If the maze blanks out you might stumble a bit in the dark so a pattern would be hard to pull of that way. Eating the center prize makes the ghosts invisible temporarly most of the time so that could throw someone off trying to chase them. One other note… I am sure some people won't like it, but I tried to give all the mazes a touch of "Hangly Man" where there are some areas in the mazes that are "open". That was intentional. So if you were not lined up right, you could bump into a wall (which would also ruin the pattern stratagy.).Should have enough things in there to mostly defeat paterns. Armor Battle…that was that Atari Combat style game for the Intellivision but was a little more complicated, right? Had the tanks on a more complicated scene? I'll have to try your version out. I love retro-style stuff.