Retro Release: Comet Busters
Posted: Wed Jul 03, 2013 6:34 am
Many maps old and new don't reach the amount of play they deserve because they aren't fun without enough people, a tendency that permeates as generations of players come and go but mostly go. For this reason I have been playing around with the idea of maps that are fun without players and perhaps more fun with players. Comet Busters was created as such an experiment.
Please try it out at bzbattleground.com:4268 and give feedback.
Maybe a quarter of the visitors ask what the point of the map is. It is stated in the intro message:
The current demo is a lot easier than the original game where you'd be doing well to go through Simple 1 to Simple 7 on just 3 lives. Note that you can only have 4 bullets at a time and the shots are affected by your lag.
At the time I had ideas such as having a communal high score board where you could enter arcade mode with limited lives as a soloist, duo or arbitrary groups.
And of course, I could have added the iconic special abilities in the original game: Hyperspace (teleport to safety), Cloaking (invisibility to hide from the UFO and cronies [smiley faces that chase you in the higher levels], Disrupter (a field that repels objects strongly corresponding to how close they are to you), Shield (protects from a collision, smashing the other object - impulse still applies).
Also to configure your abilities, such as put extra weighting on shot speed, ship speed, strength of special ability, rotation speed, etc.
Other than not having these features, the map graphics is also pretty bad of course. I tried using a skydome with high resolution textures but I'm not sure it's worth the download time. Finally I've decided to get it hosted as is and I don't intend to make any improvements as I predict there will be very little interest in this map.
Please try it out at bzbattleground.com:4268 and give feedback.
Maybe a quarter of the visitors ask what the point of the map is. It is stated in the intro message:
It is modeled on this game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvb6mEcjnwIProtip: shoot the comets until they die.
The current demo is a lot easier than the original game where you'd be doing well to go through Simple 1 to Simple 7 on just 3 lives. Note that you can only have 4 bullets at a time and the shots are affected by your lag.
At the time I had ideas such as having a communal high score board where you could enter arcade mode with limited lives as a soloist, duo or arbitrary groups.
And of course, I could have added the iconic special abilities in the original game: Hyperspace (teleport to safety), Cloaking (invisibility to hide from the UFO and cronies [smiley faces that chase you in the higher levels], Disrupter (a field that repels objects strongly corresponding to how close they are to you), Shield (protects from a collision, smashing the other object - impulse still applies).
Also to configure your abilities, such as put extra weighting on shot speed, ship speed, strength of special ability, rotation speed, etc.
Other than not having these features, the map graphics is also pretty bad of course. I tried using a skydome with high resolution textures but I'm not sure it's worth the download time. Finally I've decided to get it hosted as is and I don't intend to make any improvements as I predict there will be very little interest in this map.