I'm back at Paris for Yet Another Project Meeting ... A friend and colleague of mine -- who's tracking my homebrew development since he seen a concept sketch at our kick-off meeting in June '09 -- then enquired about the status of the BerryBat. Bad thing is, there is no appearance of BerryBat in Apple Assault so far. In "Bilou's Adventure" (the long-term full platformer), BerryBat's goal is to put some stress on Bilou's "functional blind spot" ... After some chat, I think it could find a place in Apple Assault where it would fit: something similar to the fireballs of Mario Bros. The player that runs into action in Apple Assault shouldn't be bothered by BerryBats: they would only come to tease the player who thinks he's found a "safe spot" to wait for Apples to lose their strategical advantage. Somehow, they'd be organic "Timed Out" feature.
Oh, and no need to craft a new, sophisticated counter for that: just caching the # of applemen at the last time tick and comparing it with the current tick would suffice.
ReplyDeleteEvery time the counter is seen identical, a BerryBat is released and the timeout is reduced, so that the player who still manage to avoid the real game will be facing an ever increasing BerryBat rate :)
This has the interesting side-effect that BerryBats won't show up unless all the applemen are on stage, and thus that it will take them longer to show up at lower difficulty levels :)