Hello...
Came up with this little clone/remake/adaptation/mess after about a week of playing around with Pico-8 and seeing what it can do. I'm really diggin' this little platform.
Figured since I had not seen a playable Invaders clone, I'd post up the one I was messing with. Every platform has one! I would've added some Pico-8 relation and called it "Pico Invaders" but I'm not sure how Zep might take that. Hey Zep, how would you take that?
If you're gonna look through the code, beware, it's a mental minefield right now. Have a couple of aspirins first. Was not expecting to release it so there's barely any cleaning up. Might do so in the future and update.
Enjoy!
Here's hoping later Pico-8 versions address the sound pops.
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Change Log:
So cool. It would be perfect if you added the destructible barriers, but it is hard and fun and looks /sounds just like the original (which is sitting in the corner of my office btw). (Also, Yours may progress a bit faster than the original.) If you really want to dress it up, you could add the background image and maybe color the rows of aliens. Very nice!
Thank you Gadzooka
Yes, it was progressing a bit too fast actually. I had set the "step down" to double the amount to speed up testing and failed to dial it down.
Overall tho, I did speed up the side to side march a tad in order to try and compensate for the quicker re-fire rate of the cannon (due to a lesser travel path of the missile to ceiling) and attempt to maintain some balance when I was coding it. It started to feel right and left it.
Agreed on the barriers.. I need to put them in next, though.. I did dress it up some due to your suggestion.
The ding sound while shooting gets a bit annoying, but other than that it is a very nice version of Space Invaders!
Thank you, I did try to smooth out that ding some on this last version. I'm having a bit of a time matching the sound more to the arcade, I'll get it tho :)
Great ! I love the enemy animated shots. Could you add perhaps an explosion for the bad guys when hit like original Invaders does ?
Also, if you're going for authenticity, the original invaders would move one at a time in a pattern instead of all at once.
Thanks for the comment..
The 'explosion' sprites are something I still need to add in, it needs to be in there!! Just had too much to do these last few months and it's kept me from finishing the game. Also need to correctly implement the alien projectiles, it's just wrong if compared to the original and the routines are there as functional placeholders really.
~~ Re: Step animation ~~
My intent was/is to port the game while I learned the limitations of Pico-8. I feel a port "should" try to maintain the spirit and experience of the original as much as possible while not feeling out of place in the new environment. The different environmental limitations of each is what makes porting it that much more interesting and fun for me.
Originally I started coding this in v0.14 or v0.15 while Pico-8 was limited to 30 frames per sec. Challenge I faced was that the arcade's alien animation was a product of animating one alien per cycle @ 60 cycles / sec. This made everything I tried to successfully simulate the step animation at half frame speed just look wrong and I wasn't happy with it. Since the step animation of the arcade was a consequence of memory limitations and not originally intended by design, I ditched the idea to simulate it and adjusted the plans accordingly.
Yea now we can run @ 60fps, but I'll try to implement it when I get around to cleaning up the spaghetti code.
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