Ok, ok. I know as soon as I lay down a somewhat lengthy post in my own thread it's sure to kill it. That's what always happens. But since you've been so nice as to even look at it, and actually have replied to it, I'll explain this a little bit.
The idea for the modes came from the fact that I had a lot of different ideas for this game, and the fact that some of those old atari 2600 games had 27, 66, 112 "games" or however many variations. So I figured it would be best to make the game configurable until I could get the main part of the code done. I do realize that 1, 1, 1 is very very boring. Actually I could speed it up quite a bit, so that it gets really hard, but I will explain the modes in detail below.
In any case here's a problem. The original game of keeping a ball in play and keeping it from hitting the walls while the ball speeds up is in an old qbasic games book. I did that for a LudumDare compeition (in c/c++ and haafs game engine). So then I had a friend program me a version that plays like simon, you have to hit the walls in a sequence while the ball is speeding up. This is fairly fun. But we didn't get it finished because he got busy and I got busy. So I decided eventually to learn as3 and flixel and/or flashpunk (this game uses flashpunk). So now back to the problem and that is the barrier modes are 2 types. There are 4 modes where lit up walls kill you. There are 4 simon modes. So essentially it's two games even though i have 8 modes for all of them. So my problem is whether or not to even keep the killing modes in there. Although if you choose barrier modes 1-4 and any playfield type above 1, the game might be more interesting. So do I kill the "kill" barrier modes and just do the simon ones, or do I leave it in and somehow make it more fun with the inclusion of the playfield types? In a sense these are two different games but in another they're alot similar. One you avoid walls, the other you hit walls on purpose.
Okay so now on to the description of modes -- this is going to be a bit long too.
So firstly we have 4 control modes which are orthogonal-normal, diagonal-normal, ortho-reverse, diag-reverse -- What this means is in the ortho modes it's up, down, left, right (probably most of you knew that), the diagonal ones are pretty self explanatory, as well as "normal" and "reverse" -- btw, the diagonal responds to the regular arrow keys as well... so up and down manipulate the y-axis, and left-right the x-axis -- makes it a bit more challenging. And of course in reverse if you hit down you move up and so on.
Next we have the barrier types that you know of... we have 1)"kill all" which is all the walls are lit, and you can't hit it, 2) random wall is lit up, 3) a wall is lit up and every so often rotated clock wise, and 4) rotated counter clockwise, then simon modes for 5-8, which is 5 - simon -- you have to hit a sequence of walls in the order they're shown, and each level gets successively longer, 6) simon reverse -- obviously you have to hit the walls in reverse sequence, then there's 7) chase -- which is the ball is moving and after one wall lights up you have to hit it, and wait for the next wall to light up, so you're essentially chasing it around, and
chase -opposite wall, you have to hit the opposite wall of the one that lights up, other wise same as 7...
Finally we have the playfield types, the first one being an open playfield. 2) is ghost ball, where teh ball mimics your ball in reverse, and you can't touch it. There is a period of time when both balls are in the center touching, but once you move away from that center it will turn on the collision, 3) is static obstacles, which are randomly placed each level that you have to avoid, 4) are moving objects which move horizontally or vertically depending on the level, 5) is a shrinking playfield, basically same as open except the walls start moving in toward the center, 6) interval is an invisibility mode, which means it flashes visible at a certain interval of time, each level getting longer and longer, 7) "pad" mode is where your ball is completely invisible but you have to make sure you don't hit the walls, and the only way you can know that is by watching pads on the playfield light up,
is similar except your ball appears when over a pad on the playfield. 9) is a snake mode... basically you speed up as you eat more "food", in 10) is reverse snake, where it slows you down as you eat the food...
So there's all the modes explained... I've still got to figure out how to group them for my final version.
Thanks for reading.
Keith
Developer
