Kill Screen

This was pretty funny... We hadn't finished making all of the levels yet but could still select a non-existant level in the stage select screen.  The game still soldiered on and tried to display (probably using garbage that was in memory already) Didn't crash though!


From wikipedia:
A kill screen is a stage or level in a video game (often an arcade game) that stops the player's progress due to a programming error or design oversight. Rather than "ending" in a traditional sense, the game will crash, freeze, or behave so erratically that further play is impossible.

Graphics and gameplay

output from some early level generator test runs

Another chat with Tone about the game tonight, some of the things we discussed were the graphics style, game mechanics, mini games and distribution.

Graphical style - I think that we are stuck in a weird limbo with the graphics - they don't look retro enough, and they don't look good enough either :) We discussed trying out a few different things, like reducing the palette, making them more pixelated and that sort of thing. At the moment I'm thinking of either going really C64 / 2600 ish or trying something very modern looking. Also, we are thinking about trying some swish Jeff Minter style effects, all blocky particles and vivid flashing pixels, that sort of thing. Revenge of the mutant camels, anyone remember that?

Intro - had a couple of ideas for a very silly quick intro to the start of the game, not really ready to talk about it yet but it's really very silly.

Curved Bat - We'd like to try making the top of the bat a curved surface, so that the angle the ball is reflected is changed by the position that the ball hits the bat - this could add a bit of skill to the game and allow the player to have more of a say in where the ball is going, something that is missing from a lot of breakout clones.

Collection / Avoidance Mechanic - We need to flesh the idea out a bit, but I'd like a big part of the game play to be collecting good objects and avoiding bad objects (whilst trying to stop the ball from hitting the bottom of the screen). We still need to figure out what the benefit and penalties will be for touching the objects. For the positive objects, maybe a level skip bonus or something else.

Some screengrabs

Screengrab 1 is of the very first version we had running, these are the original 1995 graphics, drawn in dpaint :)

Screengrab 2 (On the right) shows a slightly later version, we changed to a vertical display instead of horizontal. Tony added some pickups, enemies and a bit of GUI on the bottom. The gui stuff is taken from the 1995 version and needs to be redesigned.

Old GFX

some enemy sprites and some pickups

a selection of blocks

Some zoomed in images of sprites from the original 1995 version of Enigma. All graphics were drawn in DPaint running in DOS on PC (Or Amiga, I can't remember :-) ) Whatever it was, they are .iff files, anyone remember those??