A small, poorly programmed retro-ish shooter

Hey,
I'm not sure if this forum uses BBcode or HTML or what, so I'll just post some text links here and hope I don't get flamed on my very first try.
I started playing with Blitz a couple of years back. This is the first project I really spent any time on. It kind of just sat on my hard drive for a while, and I recently decided I may as well put it out there for people to check out.
It's a retro style kinda side scrolly shooter thingy.
I'm no brilliant programmer, so it may run like crap, or it may not.

Without further ado, I present... Captain Super-Ultra vs Blasternoids!

http://www.rodekill.com/games/superultra08b.zip

(PS: There's some more shoddy games at www.rodekill.com )

Interesting...

It runs fine but dare I say its a little basic. Was it written in VB?

I like the intellivision quality retro graphics... but there's really not much game there yet.

If you hide under the high score and hold down fire you can play nearly forever with only the occasional asteroid killing you. And the infrequent "boss" that you fire at a few dozen times to kill.

But hey... change pathing on the aliens to be more random and make the boss fire stuff at you... And make levels about the same length but change the aliens to be different and tougher as you progress... You'll have a pretty good shooter there.

here's what I mean by no worries about death really...

There's definately something very, very weird going on there.

There should be much more action on-screen, especially at that level. In fact, I don't think I've even ever hit that level myself...

It looks like the randomization of everything is off.

Here's a screen cap I just took:



Any ideas on what could cause this?

Was it written in VB or was it Blitz+?

It's Blitz+

You know what I like?? That 'Born to be Alive' song by the Village People...huh...oh drat!! Wrong Thread...looks like a nice little defender clone. ;)

Not sure why that would be shawno... But I literally never got anything but a random asteroid once in a while and a stream of aliens at the top of the screen all following an increasing sine wave path. I could just hold the up button and fire button once I was under the high score and watch TV for a bit until I looked back and saw an asteroid had waxed me. There was rarely any variation in the ground scrolling either. I don't know if there was supposed to be a boss at the end of every level either but I saw him 3 or maybe 4 times the whole game.

isn't there an issue with random number generation not being the same on all computers? Could this be the cause?

Hmm, that would make sense I suppose.
I haven't heard anything about it.
Is there a known workaround?

It's probably not the cause for that severe a difference. I'd expect something in a timing routine to be buggered to cause that significant a difference rather than the occasional loose bit the rand differences tend to throw.

Has anyone else tried the game for him and can verify my result or state that it works on their system?

For the record, I've had other people try it out and havn't received word on this problem, of course, they may have just assumed that it was supposed to be that way...

Thanks to everyone for your help.