JamesV wrote:
AB5 v2 will have a new minor gameplay mechanic known as "retreat mode". This was introduced later in the original Team 17 series, and I figured it would be cool to implement.
That sounds like a great idea; good thinking! Did you get inspiration from something, or was it just wishing you could retreat and fire when you were play-testing?
That sounds super helpful, I'm looking forward to your next release!
KermMartian wrote:
JamesV wrote:
AB5 v2 will have a new minor gameplay mechanic known as "retreat mode". This was introduced later in the original Team 17 series, and I figured it would be cool to implement.
That sounds like a great idea; good thinking! Did you get inspiration from something, or was it just wishing you could retreat and fire when you were play-testing?

I got the inspiration from the latter entries in the original Team 17 series, which had an almost identical feature. It can be handy in a few tight corridors Smile
In AB5 v1 there was an option in the Intex console menu called "Intex Entertainment", which didn't actually do anything but refer people to ticalc.org for more calculator games. I included this purely as a nod to Team 17's ABSE'92, which had a similar feature that read something like "Intex Entertainment is currently down for maintenance". (The real reason there was no side-game was because they ran out of disk space due to increasing the number of levels from the original game).

Team 17's AB1 did however have a side-game, and so I've decided to include it in AB5 v2. So if you need a break from killing aliens, you can log on to the nearest Intex terminal and engage in a game of Space Pong against the calculator. It's a very basic version with minimal AI, but it's a bit of a chuckle.

Space pong, eh? The minute I finished your post, I pictured a version of Pong using a little alien for a ball. You know, one of those fish things you meet in deck 4.
Either way, that would be brilliant. I love games inside games.
I am very impressed! Good Luck!
Something that has become common in games today is having "achievements". Team 17's PS3 version of Alien Breed even has achievements, so now Alien Breed 5 will also have them too!

At this point, I have 15 achievements coded, split into 3 categories. Some are simple to complete and some are a little harder. They'll each have their own little title and description, eg. "BY HOOK OR BY CROOK" is obtained by defeating a boss using only the machine gun (the weakest weapon).

Upon reading the sad news of the passing of Swiss artist HR Giger, I thought I should briefly mention him here. Amongst his many paintings and sculptings over the years, he is of course most well known for his iconic design used as the antagonist "Xenomorph's" in the Alien film series and subsequent comics, games, etc. The second movie in the series, "Aliens", was (unofficially) the inspiration for Team 17's original Alien Breed games on the Amiga, which I have spent a great deal of time over the past 16 years making & remaking on the TI calculators.

Rest in peace, HR Giger.
Very sad news, indeed. Giger was an amazing artist, and his style was so unique that he's near irreplaceable.

On a less sombre note, the achievement system looks cool--what's it look like when you get one?
merthsoft wrote:
Very sad news, indeed. Giger was an amazing artist, and his style was so unique that he's near irreplaceable.

On a less sombre note, the achievement system looks cool--what's it look like when you get one?

Very true!

Thanks! It looks like the following Smile You can view your achievements from the main menu, and also from the pause menu if you want to track your progress mid-game.
In the interests of adding more life to the game, AB5 v2 now has animated (and in some cases, interactive) objects. One of these was sort of already in v1 (and my previous Alien Breed calc games) - the one-way energy beams - however they weren't previously animated. Now they fizzle away! There are also some other hazards such as opening/closing garbage chutes which you can fall into (which were also in the original Team 17 games). Walking into one-way energy beams in the wrong direction will now also kill you (as it also did in the original Team 17 games).

Additionally there are a few various other tiles being added to the tileset. The Episode I levels will be updated to incorporate the increased tileset and animated objects.

It's the little things that make things awesome Very Happy Awesome job!
Very cool! =) I notice you never ran the wrong way through a beam in your screenshot Wink
elfprince13 wrote:
Very cool! =) I notice you never ran the wrong way through a beam in your screenshot Wink
Haha it won't let you - if you try to you die. If you watch you can see that when I go UP through the laser 2nd from the right, I then turn around and try to walk back through it and die (the spinning animation) Razz
Oh, I didn't notice you die, and assumed after all these years you were to good to make such a rookie mistake Razz
elfprince13 wrote:
Oh, I didn't notice you die, and assumed after all these years you were to good to make such a rookie mistake Razz
You'd hope after 16 odd years of making so many versions of AB on the calculators that I'd know not to walk backwards through those things hey Razz

I know it's a little self serving, but seeing as I've been spending some time lately on TI Story adding a bunch more content, I figured I might as well put together a page on the Alien Breed series, which you can view here. I'll probably go back and add some more info at a later date Smile

If you weren't aware, TI Story has just recently been re-opened for editing, so if you have any memories or knowledge on any history of the TI community, feel free to head over and add it to the wiki!
I haven't done much work on this for around 4-5 months; I lost a lot of motivation when I hit struggle town with the co-op link play feature Sad In order to get development back in action, I'm going to focus on the other features & level design for the time being.

It's quite possible that the link play might be dropped for v2.0.0, or more correctly, omitted until further notice. Having said that, 2.0.0 does still have plenty of other improvements over 1.x. Smile
Have you looked into gcn at all for link play? It likely simplifies things over just using the ports directly.
JamesV wrote:
What's could be better than Alien Breed on a TI calculator? How about Alien Breed on 2 linked TI calculators?

Whaaaaaa? This I've gotta see!
merthsoft wrote:
Have you looked into gcn at all for link play? It likely simplifies things over just using the ports directly.

I'm currently using the Bell library which is straight forward to use, I suspect the issues are more to do with the amount of code being processed per frame, and each calculator running at slightly different speeds based on battery life & model (TI-83+BE / TI-83+SE / TI-84+BE / TI-84+SE). These factors adding together I think are the causes for the time-outs.

Having said that, I don't have a lot of experience with network coding on calculator nor computer, so it's quite possible that there's something I've missed. For the time being, I'll focus on finishing the other features (nearly done) and then level design. Once this is all done, I've got a really simple link test program that I put together months ago that I'll play around with and see what I can learn from this Smile
  
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