It's audience participation time!

I'm getting to that stage now where I'm mostly just creating content (graphics and levels), and, as ever, memory is getting lower and lower.

So I have to start to make some choices, balancing one feature against another in terms of memory cost and importance. But what's 'important' in a game? Here are a bunch of features which cost memory in Blurp - what I'd like you to do is rate them in order of importance to you, most important first:

• Number of types of monsters
• Richness/detail of monster animations
• Number of levels
• 'Complexity' of levels (i.e. how much 'stuff', incidental or otherwise, is in them)
• Variety of scenery graphics

It's a pretty difficult thing to answer, which is why I thought I'd see what others think. If - for example - you feel that having 50 distinct levels is more important than having fewer levels but with pretty-looking (but redundant) graphics, then you'd rate "number of levels" quite highly on your list.

You get the idea.

Thanks!

• Number of types of monsters
• 'Complexity' of levels (i.e. how much 'stuff', incidental or otherwise, is in them)
• Number of levels (though this really depends on how many you're planning. For instance, I think 25 would be more than enough. 50 is overkill. After that, I think there's a point of diminishing returns, unless you load them in as level packs.)
• Variety of scenery graphics
• Richness/detail of monster animations

Does that help?

Sam.

This is hard isn't it, here's my pitch,

• 'Complexity' of levels (i.e. how much 'stuff', incidental or otherwise, is in them)
• Number of types of monsters
• Number of levels
• Variety of scenery graphics
• Richness/detail of monster animations

I agree with Sam about the level thing. More detail and good puzzles within is better than there being lots of bland ones.
Also for me a variety of scenery graphics is a hard balance with the number of levels. Too little variance becomes a bit bland, that said with good puzzles (as in my top choice and good variety of monsters, the bland looking levels can come alive.

It's really tough !

Thanks for your feedback chaps!

My list would be more or less the same as both of yours so it's good to see we concur on that.

Originally, I had Blurp pegged as quite a fast and furious shooting game, without so much of a planning / puzzle solving element, and so I was going to go with lots of fairly simple levels (Bubble Bobble style).

But then, after designing some new scenery graphics, I found that more intricately designed levels were quite satisfying to play, and the best ones of all were those where you had to develop some kind of strategy in order to complete the level.

So I see the design shifting a little bit. That said, the most fun thing about Blurp is the total annihilation of everything, so there's no reason why there shouldn't be a little bit of both types of screens.

Also, I've introduced different types of levels, i.e. certain screens where the game mechanic is different. Should keep it fresh and interesting.

It's probably more appropriate as a blog entry, but here are some interesting statistics: one screen, on average, weighs in at about 70 bytes, about the same as a single frame of animation for a monster. New monster types are actually quite cheap to add - graphically, two frames (mirrored in code for the other direction) use 144 bytes, plus maybe a further 100 bytes, if that, for the AI. The AI is cheap because I have plenty of high-level subroutines for testing all sorts of stuff - player visibility, whether or not they should fall, whether they can move in their facing direction, etc.

Here's my tuppence worth:

* 'Complexity' of levels (i.e. how much 'stuff', incidental or otherwise, is in them)
* Number of levels
* Number of types of monsters
* Variety of scenery graphics
* Richness/detail of monster animations

Kind regards,

Francis

Sorry for the late response, I think the following would be my order of preference ...

• Number of types of monsters
• 'Complexity' of levels (i.e. how much 'stuff', incidental or otherwise, is in them)
• Variety of scenery graphics
• Richness/detail of monster animations
• Number of levels

No of Levels is bottom of my list, because I feel it could be addressed via the loading of level packs (which would obviously be a bit of a pain for tape users, but realistically, most if not all users would play via disk, MMC/USB/CF-Flash upgrade or under emulation).