Hey guys, Rezmason here. No, I'm not jumping ship. It's just that it's about time I made an Asteroids clone, and I was wondering if anyone here knows about a community like this one that's picky enough to help me make a really really good Asteroids game. That, and I'm looking to bolster my arcade game street cred. Any pointers?
it needs hyperspace. and no colour! only black and white. and i'd like an option to turn off aliens that shoot you. and the asteroids should be white edges filled black and the space should be black.
I found the Asteroids clone at http://www.neave.com to be pretty darn good (unlike it's Tetris counterpart). I'd also say a Geometry Wars game would probably be a better option.
@Rezmason: why not start your own astroids community ? i can help you out with server space. just buy a nice domain, and redirect that to some webspace running a phpbb or vbboard or something.
@herc: that's very nice of you, but I don't think I have the time to manage one, nor am I an asteroids fanatic. First thing's first, though, I'll make a functional asteroids game and then see how I feel about running a forum. By the way, you know how asteroids has a wrapping screen? I always thought that in asteroids, if an object was halfway off the screen, it'd also be halfway on the other side of the screen. Turns out, I was wrong: classic 'roids has a giant margin as wide as a large asteroid, which is a pretty large blind spot. For shame. I've already figured out a way to do proper tiling in my clone, and I don't think it'll negatively affect the gameplay. So it won't be true to the original, but I think it'll be better.
The ports of games like Mario Bros. to Game Boy Advance have a similar blind spot. The game engine works on a 256-pixel cylinder, but the graphics are on a 240-pixel display. Super Mario Advance pans hard left or right depending on which half of the screen the player is on, but Classic NES Series games and Animal Crossing NES games in Advance Play just keep it centered. In other words, the philosophy behind early Carbon Engine.
On more than one occasion I've had the last asteroid of a level stuck in this blindspot, because it was either moving vertically or horizontally just in the right place to be out of sight, leaving me unable to do anything except shoot blindly into a corner until I hit it.
