I've invested some time working on a demake for one of my favourite games from the 8-bit era, Deflektor (by Costa Panayi). Your goal is to guide a laser to the receiver on each of the levels, access to it is blocked until you destroy all pods on the level. Laser overloads when it hits mines or if the emitter gets feedback.
HOW TO PLAY (you can go through this tutorial in the game itself)
CHANGELOG V0.5.5
- 1 MORE LEVEL (now totalling 8)
CHANGELOG V0.5.4
- 1 MORE LEVELS (now totalling 7)
CHANGELOG V0.5.3
- 2 MORE LEVELS (now totalling 6)
- ADDED safety pre-check so levels don't start on full-reflection or overload status
CHANGELOG V0.5.2
- FIXED tutorial can be run multiple times
CHANGELOG V0.5.1
- FIXED bug duplicating player cursor entity...
- FIXEX tutorial scrambled if you play before running it
CHANGELOG V0.5
- Massive rewrite (almost 80% of it is new...)
- ADDED a few more levels
- REMOVED editor mode... it is now it's own cart... was too big
- ADDED Tutorial, Intro screen, proper game over and End Game sequence
- FIXED a few nasty reflection bugs for the laser beam
CHANGELOG V0.3.5
CHNAGELOG V0.3.1
CHANGELOG V0.3
CHANGELOG V0.2
CHANGELOG V0.1
PENDING
- MUSIC: title music from the original and maybe a bg loop while playing
- SOUNDS: laser connection sound
- VISUALS & GAMEPLAY:
- live lost sequence
- level transition
- extra detail in end game sequence
- gremlins from the original game... unsure if I will be adding those
- a few more levels... the plan is get around 20-30 levels in place
- CODING: even if I refactored a lot, there's still quite some junk... could be I do some more
You move a cursor, when pressing X on it you can rotate them... It is not fully playable yet. Game mechanics: you must destroy all pods to open the path to the laser receiver and then connect to it... As I said not fully working yet, this is a very early alpha. Thank for trying it!
Missing mechanics:
- optical fiber transfer beam btwn same colored pairs
- scatter grid (white square with a black helix) scatters randomly on a 180° based on incoming angle
Level flaw: pod in upper right corner must be changed to a mirror
The mouse... I could do that but part of the challenge is movement efficiency and spectrum did not have a mouse ;) trying to be true to the original spirit
Still need to find a way to depict polarized prisms as 8*8 px is a nightmare for angle representation
Anyway thnx for testing and the comments
Excellent! I loved games by Vortex. Some of the best ever on the Spectrum.
One suggestion to make it easier to play. It would be nice if the controls moved the cursor directly (but smoothly) between things you can interact with, rather than tile by tile across the playing area, over tiles you can't do anything to.
Some comments:
-
yes, I know the reflected angle is a bit odd sometimes... on my current wip copy mirror center capture is less greedy allowing for a more natural reflection model (and trickier level design I guess...)
- Currently cannot play twice in a row on that pseudo-level as it is hardcoded and the "map" gets updated during play. It's my next milestone, level data loading and a level editor
Thnx @apLundell for trying it out and glad you had fun with it... agreed on the randomness issue. The way code works I think it is reasonable to think on adding an initial pre-check for full-reflection or overload before starting the laser... will give some thinking on how to addapt current beam calculation to reuse all the logic
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