[quote]more bugs…
-
when one is dead and the boms still attack, the score is decreased!
-
one time when i first started a new game, a bomb that was supposed to be moving didn’t move.
-
one time i died, instead of the starfield, it was all grey and it said “OWEST PANE”. the “start new game” message box was visible though. i can send you the screenshot if ya like.
[/quote]
Thanks for the bugs :).
1: menu problem - that’s now fixed for the next version 
2: bombs killing you after you’re dead. I find this particularly amusing, but perhaps I ought to get rid of it :). Especially when you get a really high score, and die on a level with swarmers - there could be 20 or 30 of the things, wearing your score down after you died. Cackle.
3: non-moving bomb. The current starting difficulty is 0 - which means “really really hard to die” :). For difficulty 0, some of the intelligent bombs just act like normal bombs. So that’s not really a bug - it’s a feature :).
While I’m at it…
Known bugs:
1 - on levels with the intelligent bombs all moving in the same direction, when they go off the top or left of the screen, they don’t come back
2 - There’s something screwed with the sound playback on my machine; might get cured by a reboot. If anyone else finds the sound starts doing funny things during a game, let me know, otherwise don’t bother and I’ll cross it off :). Examples include: volume suddenly increasing, echo (reverb) effect suddenly starting, the same sound being played many times on top of itself (just soudns like a mess!). I suspect these are bugs somewhere in the JVM > linux sound library > hardware sound driver > laptop-sound card. So I’m not particularly worried unless someone else reports it too.
3 - The “insanely difficult” levels quickly become “actually impossible with fewer than 5 lives to spare”. At the moment, levels are 100% randomly created, with just the difficulty ratcheting upwards. I’m still not decided about how to do the level progression - and I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. I’m leaning towards a strong random element, but with some known quantities (e.g. what order the different kinds of intelligent bombs occur), so that if one level is particularly hard, the same level is always particularly hard for all players (this makes an online highscores table more relevant). Well maybe not “as hard for ALL players”, but at least more consistent across different players than purely random. I want to have a couple of scores tables: e.g.:
o Highest score
o Highest level (sorted by total time taken to complete all the previous levels)
o Highest bonus achieved
…and maybe some others (but not many; only a few different scoreboards). Comments and ideas, as ever, are welcome…
FYI: “LOWEST PANE” is just a message from my layers system, telling you that you can see the lowest (default: grey) layer - which normally means you forgot to insert a fully opaque layer! (or in this case, I removed the starfield when the game finished, and forgot to put a new background back when you returned to the menu. Oops)
