hikoki wrote: ↑Tue Jan 15, 2019 6:41 pm
Very cool and easy to manage, what else can I say? I always liked Hellfire.
About colours, sometimes I confuse pilotesses' hair with power-up
Thanks, I'm glad someone else could work it! Sorry about the colour confusion, but only certain colour combos work for the characters. After I'd designed the characters how I wanted, I tried to match the pick-ups to hair or rocket colour, but had to settle on matching the suit as I wanted to use white for the pick-up surround and have green free for the penalty pick-up. I tried swapping the magenta/green suit/hair combination but it just wasn't as good. The code now makes the pick-up change colour if it stays on screen for too long; a bit like
Raiden, but I thought it was too much hassle to make them float around in a circle too!
Good spot about the game influences - I really like
Hellfire but I think that 4 is too many firing options - it's just a little too hard to work out how many times to hit the switch button to get the weapon you want. They should have kept it to 3 (e.g.
Panzer Dragoon Orta is much easier to manage). So instead of e.g. four diagonal shots you've got Amy's Spread Fire and reversed Bunny-Butt-Shot. (Although that triangular pattern of fire comes from the Spread Bomb in
Wings of Death).
I also like
Side Arms and
Raiga: Strato Fighter where you can turn around and shoot backwards - that's how I settled on two modes for each pilot. I did try having you hold the button then selecting UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT for firing pattern, or automatically turning around when you move into the right third of the screen, but kept coming back to wanting everything controlled precisely from just the one FIRE button.
Crosswize lets you change direction then hold FIRE to keep facing that way, but that changes the whole nature of the game. So that leaves holding FIRE as a special weapon (like
Air Buster or
R-Type).
Hedi's orbiting creature is a bit of the destructive orbs/'options' from
Gradius,
Cybernoid and
R-Type, and a bit of the weapon pod from
Prehistoric Isle, that changes function depending on where you move it to relative to the player (forward shot, bombs, mines, etc.). So in mine you can upgrade it to fire on each of the four diagonals. But it doesn't latch directly in front of you, as that could give you a huge advantage over the other weapons (like picking the
R-Type clone ship in
Pulstar makes it much easier). I guess it's also some kind of Pokémon...
Miya (yellow) is an obvious copy of one of my favourite shoot-em-ups (after
R-Type), which is
Thunder Cross II. I once tried writing a vertical shooter in STOS on the ST and worked out how to control outrigger drones with a single fire button; holding it to deploy them, then releasing and holding again to keep them at a distance. I keep forgetting I gave her teddy-bears in flying saucers as outriggers though! I guess they come from
The New Zealand Story but they fitted the attribute squares nicely. They were always meant to be floating cannons like the ones in the
Thunder Cross games, but I found it so much harder to design colours into a 2x2 sprite compared to all the 3x3 ones. Then I got something stuck in my head about 'Kill Enhancement Force' or 'KEF-Teddies' and it had to go somewhere.
(And yes, there's a reason behind each of the pilot's names. Who can explain all three???
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)
And can anyone familiar enough with a Greek menu explain 'KEF-Teddies' ??????
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)
)