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Programming Questions / Make cherry move in Archimedian spiral with constant speed?

« on: January 20, 2016, 04:14:09 PM »

an archimedian spiral means with each revolution the item has moved a set distance from the spawn point.

I wish two variations.

1) use spawn point as the inside of the spiral, and spiral outwords, with it getting a fixed distance out form the center with each revolution.
2) use spawn point as the outside of the spiral, and spiral inwards. Same thing, but it vanishes when it reaches the center.

it has to do it's magic by adjusting the direction without changing the speed.

how the heck do i do this? 

2

Gameplay & Discussion / Some insight into the japanese community.

« on: January 11, 2016, 04:31:45 PM »

Despite the fact that many people seem to think that Japanese people don't like hard games, there is a significant community who seems to feel to the contrary.  Additionally, they seem to like ridiculously hard and unfair games more then fair ones that are only very hard, strangely enough.

Here are some COMMERCIALLY RELEASED games that were pretty big in Japan.

1) Spelunker... for NES. This game had ludicrously unfair controls, and you couldn't even fall your height without dying. And yet it was popular enough to get a HD Remake, with an option to make jumping off of ropes and ladders less punishing.  This one DID make it to the USA, but bombed horribly, though the HD remake was more appreciated.   The Atari 8 bit original from the USA was easily as hard, but had more fair control.
2) Tower of Druaga, a game which you have no HOPE of beating without a guide. This was an ARCADE game originally! It got ported to many systems, and they added on "Another Tower" which is an even harder version of the game.  Oh, and there was no guide for it at first.  Only blind faith that the game is possible and sheer persistence (and a LOT of quarters) allows it to be beaten. This never made it to the usa, that I can remember, until the Namco Museum series, and they give you the guide. And it's STILL hard even with infinite continues!

So it's little surprise that Games such as

Kaizo Mario World
Syobon Action (cat mario)
The Life Ending Adventure of Owata

get created.

So I Wanna Be The Guy is right up their alley.

Pretty much if a game get hard and unfair enough, it crosses the line twice and becomes fun in their opinion.  There's a video of a japanese female playing Spelunker for the first time. She starts LAUGHING after a couple deaths.

3

Game Design / RNG in avoidance. Doing it RIGHT.

« on: January 11, 2016, 06:10:23 AM »

A random phase can keep people from falling asleep. so it's a good idea to include them. however, their difficulty can go all over the place, because, well, they are random.  They tend to range from joke to moderately challenging (for the easy ones) and from hard to unfair for the toughest ones.

There is a better way.

Test the phase yourself with user specified seeds. if the seed is too easy, or too hard for you, try a new one.  Once you have collected 50 or 100 seeds of decent difficulty, randomly select a seed to start the pattern off with.

You now have something that cannot be memorized, yet won't give the player a cheap shot, since cheap shots in random patterns are just not fun. (save the cheap shots for static and streaming patterns.) It plays just like a standard random phase, but doesn't ever screw the player over or give a free ride.

I Wanna Clear the Easy Miku is pretty reasonable with it's randomness (if you pay attention you can deal with it all pretty easily). But for the second one, the randomness puts the difficulty all OVER the place, and it suffers for it. While the random barrages that expand from Miku always seem fair, the volcano and the second negi wave are all over the place.  And the small box section can get really rude at times.

Now if you find 50 seeds without discarding any for being too easy or too hard, then you have designed a good random phase, and probably don't need the workaround.