Rnadom started off as a pretty lame shoot-em-up engine I made in BlitzPlus in late September 2004. Jon
suggested I make a game out of it, so in an attempt to familiarize myself with Blitz' object management
system, I slapped together some targets from some primitives and jammed them
in. With it's basic gameplay and surreal abstract scenario, I thought it kinda looked like one of those
'special rules' type spaceship type games like Noiz or
rRootage so I stuck rudimentary collision detection together, some 'Chain' type rules in and named this new
game Chain Lightning. More and more features were added to the game, and eventually I changed the name to
HyperChain. (A crap name, yeah. But I think I changed it because Chain Lightning didn't have any lightning in.)
So... HyperChain, eh?
In HyperChain you control a ship at the bottom of the screen which can shoot and travel left and right. Shapes
rain down from the top of the screen, and it's your job to shoot 'em! If you let them glide off of the bottom,
then the red meter on the right will decrease, causing the shapes to rain down faster. To get points, you
shoot the shapes... the amount of points you get is related to the number of shapes you've shot without
letting a single one of your bullets fly off the top, so don't miss!
Special Kudos to my friend Edd for making the neat HyperChain/Calm sound effects!
Well, sir, you'd be right. Nobody liked HyperChain, and I don't blame them. It's not a very good game to play,
there's no real objectives and it eventually ramps to crazy difficulty. Playing it, you realize that when the
meter reaches the bottom and the shapes come thick and fast, you can hammer the spacebar to create long chains
through sheer luck.
I didn't want my semi-nifty ship engine to go unused, so I had another shot at making some game mechanics.
People seemed to want some consequences for colliding the ship (In HyperChain they simply slid through your
ship) so I added some... I gave the ship the ability to absorb the shapes and derive special powers from them.
The meter on the right was replaced with a blue meter (the Calm meter) which indicated the speed of release of the shapes.
Shooting the shapes lowered the meter, letting them slide increased it. Objective: To not let the meter hit
the top.
HyperChain:
Left and right maneouvre the ship.
Space fires.
Escape quits.
That's about the size of it. Go for the big score!
You can either try and pick off the shapes as they fall, or you can just let the meter empty and blast the
tangle of shapes randomly as they tumble down.
HyperCalm:
Left and right maneouvre the ship.
Space fires.
Escape quits.
Return activates any powerups in your posession.
Go for broke!
Let's admit it, the game is not really that much to talk about. However, in making it, I learned a whole bunch
about how Blitz languages manage collections of objects. In the end, it was more of a parody of those
'special rules' shoot-'em-up's than anything. Anyway, I'm not going to be doing anymore BlitzBasic stuff
for quite a while: I can't remember when exactly I was I suddendly started to program C stuff,
it was probably about Christmas 2004 or something, learning
ALLeGRo on
tepples' advice. (Yes, guys, this leads somewhere!)
As soon as I managed to get some sort of C working
on my proper comp, I sorta left Blitz behind. C is good. (You've gotta realise, folks, that I'm writing this in Summer
2005, and I can't really remember when all these things happened all that well. ._.)
Although, those shapes are a pretty good idea, they're iconic, y'know. Unmistakable. Let's just see where C
takes me, eh? We might be seeing the Hourglass again sometime in the future...
But you'd way be better off looking here...
Golly gosh, there's way more spaceship shooty games in the world than I can possibly hope to mention...
Any game I mention will seem to be a comparison against Hypercalm, and that would be just silly on the grounds
that they would pummel HyperCalm and Chain deep, deep into the ground.
Here's a link to that Noiz and rRootage
I mentioned. They're based on Ikaruga, y'know. Tangential rant -
I don't like Ikaruga, it's pretentious and way too hard. Here's a link to
Warblade by Edgar M. Vigdal of Deluxe Galaga fame. Deluxe Galaga. You know... that one on the Amiga.
Nevermind. Anyway, Edgar is the man, so I gave him some money.
Also, I'm kinda partial to a bit of
Every Extend. Y'all should play that too.
