Retrostalgic

    Astroclash
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Dev Log

  1. Astroclash
  2. More Playback Timing Issues

Astroclash

I got sucked into the whole Amico drama. It was very entertaining.

I've never been a big fan of original Intellivision. Although I do have a couple of those systems and a ton of boxed games. They were easy to come by in the 90s and crazy cheap.

However I am a big fan of Keith Robinson the people who made the games. Blue Sky Rangers. The original web site still exists but it's now stained with Amico garbage.

I'm a sucker for the stories of the people behind the games and their process. Documentaries like Howard Scott Warshaw's Once Upon Atari are my jam.

As a fan of old games. I thought I'd try and make my own re-imagined versions of some of the Intellivision title. At least one anyway.

Start off with an Intellivision classic.

Breakdown the mechanics. Make it even simpler.

One button. Shoot rocks. A bomb.

Then there is name of the game.

Saw this on Howard Scott Warshaw's Once Upon Atari documentary. It's just a list of titles for games the Atari marketing department wanted.

haha. Been there. asd

A screen grab of the list of game names old Atari marketing department wanted to publish; Rockfight, Buring Rubber, Deathray, Space Commander, Beat the Clock, Supernova, Armored Avenger, Maze Craze, Astroclash, and Baseball

The list of games are:

  1. Rockfight
  2. Buring Rubber
  3. Deathray
  4. Space Commander
  5. Beat the Clock
  6. Supernova
  7. Armored Avenger
  8. Maze Craze
  9. Astroclash
  10. Baseball

More Playback Timing Issues

Today I worked on adding a progressive difficulty. It's pretty simple and I like it. Makes this little game more fun and replay-able.

There was some weird timing issues on the playback of this game in particular that the other games didn't encounter. Took awhile to figure it out.

When small asteroids were spawned during playback they could be a fraction out of sync.

This would cause either the wrong rock colliding with the bullet or it was missed even though during debugging it looked like the bullet overlapped the rock.

I'm spawning the small rocks in the collision callback function of the big rock. I tired setting a flag to spawn in the update() function but when I did, it was off by a frame.

What ended up working was setting setTimeout() for 1 millisecond and calling the small asteroid spawn function from that.

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Added particle effects and sound. Then tested for awhile.

Game feels ready to go. Going to look at it with fresh eyes tomorrow.