Great start, man! I love this game, but i feel it could do with a "pandora-fication" release. Get rid of the mouse to select (d pad and x button will do) and sort the default controls out too - make it more like Asteroids? Also, as you've already pointed out, the sound is atrocious - why does it sound so bad, eight bit samples should still be listenable?
It's quite an embarrassing release to be honest
However, with my new addition to the family I have very little time left to me to sit coding for hours on end!
Anyhow: For those of you that have played it, the main thing I've noticed is that mouse control is the way to go - unfortunately, the Pandora doesn't have a mouse! We're stuck with simulating one with the nubs (which IMO is only slightly better than using the DPad to spin the ship around). Even with nub control, it's less than ideal.
So I've been thinking - a joystick mode that uses the nubs to point in a particular direction, and the face buttons to thrust/fire - or even use the nub to thrust in a direction (but the problem there is you won't be able to spin on the spot and fire). I'm open to suggestions here folks!
My configuration sets the nubs as rotate in mouse mode, A to fire, Y to thrust and X to brake - it's playable but not as twitchy as I'd like.
For the menus, I'm thinking that it would be OK to retain mouse control, but when UP/DOWN is pressed, the pointer jumps to the nearest item up or down from the current position. Adding FIRE to select an item instead of left mouse button (the shoulder buttons currently) would give the user a menu more consistent with the game controls.
Again, open to suggestion.
Finally, there's the sound. It's awful, I admit that - and I have no idea why. It only works in 8bit/22050Hz, because the game speed depends on it in that configuration. If I increase the frequency then the game runs faster, if I increase the bit depth I get sound corruption. I may need to modify the sample creation to interpolate the sound data up to 44100/16bit - we'll see what happens.
D.
