Wow, another "stellar" (+buttery smooth) entry of yours! 🤯
You really have managed to get all the shmup elements in such a small space, very impressive.
Makes such a diff. having the "single instance bullet" (or whatever the mechanic is called) - adds way more tension 😅
The progressive "homing" attack waves feel great also, def not a cakewalk to play.
Finally, loving the P8SCII ship - especially clever use of ❤️ for twin engine jets, very cool 😙👌
Another solid entry, nice one 👍
Viewing post in Sector 498 jam comments
Thanks,🙂
I'm glad the little workarounds I came up with seem to work well enough. The single bullet was just a way of saving space vs having another group of table entries to cycle through, and the 'homing attack waves' are just an increasing spawn probability with distance traveled, and an x position that changes by distance to the player's ship/96.
I was originally stuck on the random generation because the background needed srand(), but that meant no random enemy spawning without creating a list of values to draw from at startup. I hit on using another srand() call with the distance traveled as the seed, which gives random spawns that are the same every session, and saved around 30 bytes. I'm thinking about doing a writeup for this and/or my 550-char Space Invaders, maybe some of the strategies I found will help somebody fit their regular-size games into Pico-8 better.