I think I've got the enemy ball AI working to a moderately decent degree, but of course I can't be 100% sure until the rest of the game is coded, and I'm actually facing him as an enemy.

Most of the day's coding was focused on making the enemy do corners a little better. Even with padded out corners, it was still managing to fall into the abyss much more than I'd like.

In the end, I got it balanced reasonably well. It still frequently plummets to its death, but then so does my own player, since it's all a little bit crazy when it gets going!!

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100 NOW compilations, and what do we get?!
Track Listing
That's a bit of a shit selection, isn't it..?

I mean, I can understand why they did that. Every NOW needs to have modern tracks, and this one additionally has to celebrate the past.

.. But.. Really..
Would it have killed them to have got a selection of modern artists to rerecord the original track listing of the original NOW 1?
..?
That's what I'd've done.

*sigh* What a wasted opportunity.

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"I know", says I, "I'll write tomorrow's SoCoder newsletter now, so that I don't have to do it in the morning, and can instead get right back to doing the important coding!"

Nope.. Instead I was up until 3:30am doing the newsletter, and then didn't wake up until after 10, thus completely losing all the time I'd managed to save!

D'oh!

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With so many games to play, there's oodles of feedback for each.

Let's see what RSKGames thought of this week's game!

@RSKGames

(I had to look both of those games up! I've made too many games!!)

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Seems like @RSKGames has helped to uncover the reason the leaderboards are so bloomin' empty.

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Spent a long time today fighting over how the control should work for our little Ball player.

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Always evolving, the Framework needs more Scoreboard tweaking.

I was hoping to get this done, over the past week, but the Radial Warning complications and lack of gameplay, ended up shifting my focus.

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Over at GBATemp, user ZeldaPlayer67 asks..



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Frantic disc blasting ahoy!

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I'm quite happy with how the game's turned out, but..
1. It's been one heck of a struggle.
and
2. It's really quite a hectic game!!

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*phew*
I've found it!!

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#571 isn't coming together, AT ALL..
No matter what I do, I can't seem to get it to work out.
Either it's too easy, and your bullets are too powerful, and the baddies can't reach you...
.. or it's WAY too difficult, and the sheer insane bombardment of enemies is completely overpowering.

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Picture the scene.
A swarm of enemy are bearing down on you, and you have infinite bullets.
You hammer the shooty key, and the enemy are thwarted swiftly, because they're right above you, and you needn't even aim.

This is the issue that this week's game is currently having.

Having the enemies swarm in more varied directions can lead to the game being more than a little unfair. On the other hand, reducing the weapons leads to even more unfairness, as you struggle to fire at the insanity ahead of you.

On the flip side, the enemy don't currently have bullets, because quite frankly the whole screen is going bonkers, and it's hard to keep track of everything.


This game is proving incredibly difficult to balance, as.. right now, the thing's practically un-loseable. Just hammer away at the fire button, and you're sorted.

Hmm...

Here is the tool
.zip contains Windows exe, BlitzMax Sourcecode and this font.

Hopefully the font's creator doesn't dislike that I've included it.
If you find a better font (eg, one with the little serifs on) then let me know.

I thought that, for this game, having a string of enemies would result in a more difficult enemy to beat.

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Here's roughly how the game's looking, so far.

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This simple little menu has taken most of the past 24 hours to get working correctly.

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Yesterday, I spent a fair amount of time deleting a lot of content

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The enemies for this week's game are slightly different than I imagined, but they seem to be spawning and roaming about the level in a decent way.

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Last month, I subscribed to the ZenPop Ramen selection.
The box appears, then over the coming weeks, I review each of the noodles.

This will likely be the last of the ZenPop Noodles that I cross-post here, mostly because the views have been minimal, and nobody seems all that interested!! No point clogging up the blog with my munchies, when I have all these games to blog about.
If you want to read about future Noodles, keep an eye on the SoCoder Thread instead, where I've another 4 months worth of these boxes to come

If you want me to continue cross-posting the Noodles here, be sure to let me know in the comments, below.

Noodle Nine : End of the Line

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