Vec-Man

[Peer]

Many thanks for testing and for the detailed feedback! Glad you like it

I will try to come up with some more sounds, and I will also look into the issue you mentioned regarding the level intro music.

The perceived "pixel-shift" of the dots in a horizontal line does indeed happen and is due to the infamous drift effect of the Vectrex. This occurs only in the small mazes that are completely filled with pills. I tried to come up with a clever method of drawing all those pills while staying within the 50Hz limit, but maybe this method was too clever in a sense. I tested several settings in order to make the "pixel-shift" as tiny as possible, but since this is caused by vector drift, it shows up differently on different consoles. With the current setting, it is almost invisible on my no-buzz Vectrex, but clearly visible on my buzz Vectrex. I will try to come up with a different method.

When Vec-Man eats a power pill, then the ghosts in fact do alter their strategy and go from chase mode to flee mode, but they do not reverse directions, so their new strategy will only become effective at the next intersection. At some point I had added the reversal of directions to the game, but that also caused ghosts that were already moving away from Vec-Man now to turn and run directly towards him, and so I removed the whole thing again. I will revive that experiment and see what I can do here.

Spoiler: In higher levels the pills will cease to move randomly and will start to run away from you

And out of interest: Is the game too easy?

Cheers,
Peer

[Peer]

I have uploaded new beta test binaries (now version 1.4) of Vec-Man.

More sound effects have been added, and I have tried to reduce the "pixel-shift" effect. Please let me know if this is an improvement, and if you like the new sounds.

Cheers,

Peer

[hcmffm]

Just did some testing on a real Vectrex (Vec-Man Version 1.3). The power pills can be seen clearly, now. The game is pretty good to play with the real controller and graphics look great. In some levels the "lanes" are pretty long and Vec-Man looks and plays a bit like "Dodge 'em'. Luckily you can change direction and thus avoid collisions - unlike Dodge 'em.

IIRC, my first game ended in level 18. In the first levels, I won a life in every level so I could find out the maximum of lifes which is 9. I like the low difficulty of level 1 but I think difficulty should ramp up more quickly. ATM, one can choose the level (=game) and I tried out level 99. I've tried twice and couldn't complete level 99 but I was close which means that it is too easy.

Bugs:

• Two play gamer seems to be a bit buggy: At some stage no pills were left but the level didn't end. And the game continued after no lifes were left. Life counter displayed "0", and when dying again it displayed an infinity symbol.
• Sometimes ghosts spawn at the same spot and time resulting in two ghosts overlapping each other. In my case the ghosts even walked the same path so they walked together for quite a while (till I ate them). FAIK, this happens in the original arcade game, too, so this could be considered a feature.
  
  
• After my successful game (up to level 18) the title "Top 8" was shown. Right after this the game reset and the menu of the VecMulti was shown. (Might be a bug or a problem of the VecMulti).

Suggestions/ideas:

• Power pills might change in brightness/flicker to indicate their power.
  
• Currently there is no score. And players can set the level (=game). This means that comparing Vec-Man scores isn't possible and comparing levels isn't possible either. Would be cool if something could be done about this so that Vec-Man could be used in a competition like Vector War.
• Ghosts are not very keen to catch the player (i.e. sometimes they turn left or right even though they are directly behind the player.)

[Peer]

Hi Helmut, many thanks for testing again!

Great that you report how you deem the difficulty of the game. Would be interesting to also know how others see this. The complete sequence of levels, including the ramp up of the difficulty, is generated by a level generator, i.e. an algorithm. That was how the whole Vec-Man project started. I was simply curious to try out procedural content generation. Or, in other words, I am just too lazy and have not enough imagination to design all levels by hand

There is (no surprise here) a total of 256 levels in Vec-Man. It starts out easy, and then difficulty gradually ramps up. At some point (I have not yet investigated where exactly) it should become really hard to almost impossible to complete another level. There are many things which change in the long run. The ghosts and the pills are ever increasing their speed. Ghosts continually cycle between two modes: hunter mode, and scatter mode. The length of the scatter mode decreases, and from some point on the ghost will stay in hunter mode forever (this is adopted from the original Pac-Man). The number of ghosts per level goes up, the number of power pills per level goes down, and the layouts of the maze will become more and more challenging (longer isles and less passages between isles).

Regarding the bugs you found:

- Two player mode: I will look into this. My guess is that there is ram corruption due to stack-overrunning-heap. Good thing that Malban implemented a very useful stack tracking mechanism in Vide.

- Ghost can overlap and walk the same path for a while, that is intended, but there should be no spawning of two ghosts in the very same position at the beginning of a level. Did that happen? Or did that happen during game play?

- The high score display is definitely buggy if it showed "Top 8" after level 18. It should have been "Top 18". I will investigate.

Great that you spotted all this!

Regarding your suggestions:

- Flickering power pills: I will try something here.

- The ghosts are in fact very keen to catch the player  They start out rather peacefully but get more and more aggressive in the long run. I will try to make their behavior a bit more challenging.

- There is currently no scoring in Vec-Man. In a sense, the number of the level that you have reached is the score you get. If I had been true to the original games, then there would be no selection of the start level as a game option, and player would always have to start at level 1. I found that a bit too restrictive, especially for beta testing. But what I implemented is that the machine's high score is updated only if game play is started at level 1. The high score is shown on the title screen (usually only to be seen after pressing the reset button), but in Vec-Man the title screen cycles through a warm reset, and thus you can see the high score after completing a game. So, technically, this can be used as evidence in tournaments like the Vector War. The problem is that multi-carts abuse the warm reset for their own purposes, and that is why this does not work as desired. When flashed on a multi-cart, Vec-Man goes back to the cart's menu after a game, and the high score can be overwritten by starting a different game from the cartridge. I will see what I can do here. I will come up with a method that shows your score including evidence of having started the game at level 1.

Thanks again, and many cheers,
Peer

[hcmffm]

Thank you, Peer, for your exact and clear explanations. I've just played Vec-Man 1.4 for another 10 minutes. Here are my impressions and thoughts.

Highscore display
I guess my "bug report" above was wrong. Probably the game did say "High 18" and then the menu of VecFlash was shown. This time I played Vec-Man and after the game the menu "Player / Game" appeared. I waited a bit and soon after that "High 7" appeared. After that the VecFlash menu appeared and I could no longer start Vec-Man (instead of the game an empty/black screen is shown). I had to power off the Vectrex. I'm not sure how other games behave on the VecMulti so the behaviour of Vec-Man might be normal on the VecMulti.

Difficulty level
Playing a level of Vec-Man takes about a minute. So my very first game with 18 levels took more than 20 minutes. That's quite long for the very first game. I'd consider myself a medium player. Playing a game for the first time shouldn't be frustrating but it shouldn't be too long, either, I think.

Introducing difficulty levels (Novice, Normal, Expert) might be an idea to fulfill the needs of a wide audience but first you should wait and see what other people think about VecMan's difficulty.

Sound
The new, permanent background sound is good. It's not enerving and the change in the pitch while the power pill has effect is a good auditive support.

Pixel Shift
Pixel shift is almost gone and occurs seldom.

Pill duration

The duration of the pills decreases significantly with each level. This makes hunting all ghosts almost impossible even in lower levels (<10). Gathering all ghosts behind Vec-Man might be a way, though.

Usage of Brightness

Currently, it looks to me as if brightness isn't used much in the game. Perhaps the pellets or the walls could be a bit darker. This might make the game look even more diverse and appealiing.

So much for now. Again, thank you, Peer, for your recent changes which made your good Vec-Man even better.

[Peer]

Greetings everyone, and sorry for the delay.

Mondays to Wednesdays are my busy teaching days. In addition to that I had to prepare another workshop last Sunday which is scheduled for next weekend. So I did not find any time for Vec-Man related things. I really want to finalize the game, but it might take me some more days to come up with the next 1.5 beta version.

The one thing I already managed to investigate is the "all pills eaten but level did not finish" issue. I could not reproduce this in all my tests, the code looks fine, and Vide confirmed that there is no corrupted memory due to stack-overrunning-heap. It would be great to know if anyone is still experiencing this with the latest 1.4 beta version, or if this only happened with earlier beta versions.

Many Cheers,
Peer

[hcmffm]

Thank you for your post, Peer. Please take your time with development of Vec-Man and your responses. There's no need to hurry and if you should decide to continue in autumn that's also fine. You set the pace and a slow pace gives more people the opportunity to test Vec-Man and provide feedback, too.

May 22, 2019 6:14:59 GMT -5 Peer said:

... The one thing I already managed to investigate is the "all pills eaten but level did not finish" issue. I could not reproduce this in all my tests, the code looks fine, and Vide confirmed that there is no corrupted memory due to stack-overrunning-heap. It would be great to know if anyone is still experiencing this with the latest 1.4 beta version, or if this only happened with earlier beta versions.

Thank you for analyzing this. I'll try to reproduce the problem and will report back. Perhaps a last dot/pill was there and I just didn't see it. Also, I will do more playing on the week-end - until now I've played about 20 minutes, only, and that's not enough to really judge a game well.

[Malban]

Hi,
just played up to level 30 (from 1). Everything regarding dots/eating/pills seemed fine.
Difficulty is ACE ... gradually getting more difficult - but not boring.

Two notes:
- on level 26 (4 ghosts) I ate all 4 ghosts with one pill -> didn't get an extra live (I had only 3 lives left).
- level 27 (I think) was the only level I saw that refreshed from start with more than 50Hz (wobbling) - all other levels were very clean

Thumbs up!

Malban

[Peer]

Many thanks to you both for testing again!

Sorry for the delay, and sorry for not yet having come up with a 1.5 beta. I had some additional classes to teach in the past two weeks, and whatever free time I had I spent beta testing VectorBlade (great fun, great game!!!) and (with the help of Malban) trying to pinpoint a hardware defect in one of my consoles (no so much fun).

I will try to continue working on Vec-Man as soon as possible. I know that there is no hurry, but I really want to complete that project rather soon. We all know how difficult and time consuming it is to finish just the last 2% of a project, and I do not want Vec-Man to suffer the same fate as The Count (still locked-up in its crypt and sleeping, that blood-sucker). Also, (spoiler alert), there are some other experiments I have in the pipeline which I am curious about and which I would like to work on

Cheers,
Peer

[gtoal]

> It started out as a tiny experiment, not Pac-Man related at all. There was something I always wanted to try on the Vectrex in the context of procedural content generation techniques. I decided to use automatic maze generation as my test run example. Later on I added the Vec-Man character to my experiment just for fun. Then at some point the whole thing got a bit out of hand and started to grow into a game of its own.


Did you get a decent maze generator working? You might want to have a play with gtoal.com/src/pacman-maze-generators/pacmaze.c.html - maybe tweak it for the smaller screen of the Vectrex.  I think the implementation I did later in Scratch may be a bit more comprehensive but this one at least is in C and shows the general idea...  generate, then eliminate boards with potential problems...

G

[Peer]

Hey Graham, great to hear from you again

Yes, the maze generator worked even before anything else was there. It is very specific to this game. Since the algorithm is done completely in my retro C, I needed mazes that can be drawn very efficiently with the BIOS routines while still having an acceptable size on the screen. The mazes have a special layout structure, and the other aspect of the generator is that it generates a sequence of mazes that start out very easy and then get more and more difficult (according to a certain criterion). It turned out that it worked too perfectly and that the mazes in the very high levels are impossible to beat. Theoretically, it is possible, but not in combination with the speed and the AI of the ghosts in those levels. Right now I am tweaking this a bit. Thanks for the link, I will check it out.

Will also post a bit more about the most recent developments later.

Cheers,
Peer

[Peer]

Here is the long overdue update regarding the most recent Vec-Man developments.

I did quite a lot of modifications, and therefore have decided that the next step is to publish a first release candidate instead of yet another beta version. I will probably do so tomorrow. Right now I want one more night of testing things by myself.

Here is what I did:

- The high score display now works on all flash- and multi-cartridges.
- Levels 1 to 200 (out of 256) can be selected as starting levels. The high score is updated only if gameplay is started at level 1.
- Slightly reduced the volume of the "background sound".
- Brightness is now used...
- Continuous sound bug fixed
- Ghost AI slightly enhanced / altered.
- Maze generation slightly altered. The lower levels are not affected, but the higher levels should not be that impossible anymore.
- Neverending level bug hopefully located and fixed.
- Added some tiny bonus…
- Added one tactical aspect that should enable the player to develop a strategy for beating the ghosts…

- Several minor performance improvements

- Other things I forgot

Cheers,
Peer

[Peer]

Greetings everyone!

Release candidate version 1-1 of Vec-Man is ready for download and testing

Please note:

• During gameplay:
  • Button 1 pauses the game.
    
• Brightness:
  • The game's graphics use different brightness levels. Please adjust the brightness of your console (the potentiometer on the back) so that you have a good contrast (you will see what is meant). I found that the usual rule of thumb ("turn brightness up until the dot in the center of the screen appears, then turn it down again until that dot just vanishes") does not give the best results (vectors are too bright to give a good contrast). On my consoles, turning down the brightness a bit more works best.
    
• Known issues:
  • At the very beginning of some levels you might still encounter the infamous "vector wobbling". There is an easy fix, just use less objects in that level. However, for now I would rather see if I can do some more performance improvements to get rid of this. It would still be good to know in which levels this does happen, and how disturbing you find it.
    
• Questions:
  • I would like to know if the difficulty of the game feels right? It should start out easy, then progress in a challenging way, yet keep the higher levels (all of them up to level 256) playable. This is hard for me to judge, as I have played/tested a lot while developing. I know a certain something about the ghost AI which certainly gives me an advantage and which I simply find very hard to ignore while playing.

Feedback is very welcome!

Many Cheers,

Peer

EDIT: For a list of the most recent changes, please read the previous post.

[Peer]

Greetings!

Vec-Man release candidate version 1-3 is now available for download. It features an additional initial scaling to compensate for the analog effects and to give better looking results on a broader variety of consoles.

This will most likely be the last version before the final release. Feedback and bug reports are still very welcome and highly appreciated

Cheers,

Peer

[TrekMD]

Cool! Do you plan on making carts of this game? That'd be awesome!