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Spellrazor

Spellrazor - a haunted arcade game from 1981 · By Fluttermind

Control configuration

A topic by hambo3 created Mar 13, 2016 Views: 775 Replies: 8
Viewing posts 1 to 9

Absolutely loving this. Like Big-E, I WANT this on my mame cabinet but my controls are wired through an old joypad interface so my question is, would it be possible to support this? Also configuring the many spell keys down to just 8 buttons might be tricky but Im thinking I could configure a top 8 or something?

Anyway, your thoughts greatly appreciated.

Developer

Hiyo,

I've had one potential solution for this requirement in the back of my mind. What I *could* do is externalize a data file which is read in, and allows players to map keys in a table: e.g. {{"A","Z"}, {"B","C"}, {"D", "F"}} etc. This would remain the same between games, and live next to the save file. It would probably utterly break the game if created incorrectly, though, but deleting the file would fix any issues.

I'm not keen to add this as a UI feature in game as it flies in the face of the whole thing. Having Arrow showing up as 'A' but activated by 'Z'? Sounds like a disaster - it's hard enough to get people to leave their comfort zone of their 5 fave spells as it is (Have you tried being a FlyKisser? Or a ShuffleMage? Both are kind of awesomely fun ways to semi-break the game).

Sound like it might do the job? I can offer an alternative super-hacky method if you're up to editing code and just want to see if it's worth it. PM me from the Fluttermind website and I'll go into the grubby details.

Thanks Dene,

Ive PM'ed you. Cant wait for this :)

(2 edits)

"ShuffleMage" ??? I don't even know what that means. Using the command 'shuffle'? I guess I'd shied away from it due to the 25% spell loss. But is there something tricky implied by the combo "shuffle" and "mage". Is "mage" a riff on "magus"? Or maybe it's just a cute word to mean "use 'shuffle' more often".

No answers required. I'm happy to experiment unspoiled. But I don't mind if anyone does want to speculate or explain.

Wow. FlyKissing is really effective. I was saving my more exotic spells for later, harder encounters, which I can see now is sometimes really suboptimal. Classic mistake of "dying with a full compliment of smart bombs"

Ok you lost me! I was just enjoying shooting and blasting stuff with the volume on loud!

I'm guessing the console is an important part of this game? I tried the 'shuffle' as above, FlyKissing 'shufflemage' what is this sorcery...

Developer(+1)

Why, yes. The console is kind of 50% of the game, in my view!

Developer

I'm also adding 'X-Raycutioner' to the silly 'build type' list. You can use X-ray to massively abuse several spells. Huge fun IMHO.

For the update, Ive a solution to my keyboard/joypad mapping issue. Found something called animicro which I can run simultaneously with spellrazor from my frontend (I could probably have it running always but avoiding possible interference with mame) and is working beautifully. Even better antimicro allows double click and hold configs so i can potentially get 3 mappings per button and as I have 8 of them Im almost there :)

Still makes console tricky but not impossible.

Cant get fullscreen on load to work yet but can live with it. Pic to follow, maybe.