EMOTION: Release 4 ================== gameplay -------- Knock two balls of the same colour together to eliminate them (10 points). Knock two differently coloured balls together to make a pod of a third colour. Fly your ship into pods to eliminate them (25 points) and replenish your energy. Pods will grow into balls if left too long. Balls explode if left too long (minus 18 points), this depletes ship energy. Eliminate all balls to complete a level. Run out of energy and it's game over! tips: - Avoid creating pods unless you need a second ball of that colour - Fly over pods as soon as possible unless you need them advanced: - Try playing for points and not just level clearance - You can create pods on purpose to harvest points - Learn which ball colour combinations make which colour pods - You can make some levels can last eons and score lots of points with careful pod and ball creation controls -------- dpad/stick left - rotate ship left dpad/stick right - rotate ship right X - thrust SQUARE - reverse thrust L2 - left strafe thrust R2 - right strafe thrust the editor ---------- There is a level editor in this release. Originally it was intended for just us, to design new levels...but there was no reason not to make it available for players too. Be warned though the arrangement of objects does not get saved to a memory card and it only lasts for the duration of the game your playing at the time -- so you probably wouldn't want to spend too long editing, instead I envisage you'll probably just want to use it to tweak a level a bit (perhaps to reposition an object on a level you have found impossible to clear, to make it a bit easier). You can access the editor menu by pressing Select once a game has started and selecting "EDITOR" from the menu that appears in the top left of the screen. When you have finished select "QUIT" and you will be returned to the game with the new layout (the life span of the pods and balls will be set back to their original duration). Do not select "SAVE" or "SAVE'N'EXIT" from the edior menu unless you want to submit a new lay-out to be included in the next release of emotion -- check first with Jon or Matt that there is going to be a further release though. When you save, it sends generated C source code to the console on your PC which you can cut and past into an email and send to jon@technospective.co.uk Make sure you get the whole C routine it outputs. Controls available only in the editor:- L1/R1 - camera left and right. Triangle and Circle - camera up and down. Keep circle pressed for an over-head view (recommended) In "POSITION" mode: position the selected object by using thrust as if you were flying the ship in the normal way, but inertia is disabled while in editor mode so you do not need so much skill to move objects about as when your in normal game mode. history ------- Matt: Well this is weird. Last time I looked at this code I was a naive student working from a tiny box bedroom in a shared house somewhere in Manchester. Aphex Twin on the stereo (RDJ Album), sure this game was going to get signed, published, marketed and make us millions... I look around where I'm sitting now, workplace still a bedroom? Yep (well for the stuff I love making anyway). Shared house? Nope, thank god, own flat now. Manchester? It somehow became Hull and then, even more mysteriously, I ended up here in London. Aphex Twin still on the stereo? Of course (drukqs). Published games, lots of cash? It's probably best if I don't warm up my cynicism for the commercial games industry, lets just say we worked bloody hard, and we didn't make millions. But anyway I'm putting the finishing touches to a game I started writing with someone I met over the internet and ended up working with in real life. We shared the fun of getting our games canned, eating at Yankee Burger, being derided via email, being frozen by the Humber wind and ultimately being made redundant. This was the first game me and Jon worked on together, and it was probably the most fun to create, I hope you like it. Jon: My memories are becomming very murky now of how things first started-out on this game. At the time I was working on a project that had gotten hopelessly out of control... it had started out as a first person shoot`em-up and developed into a snow-balling human physics emulation project. When you're working on a project commercially you're considerate of deadlines and your employer's costs, but when it's just your own time and your own money (and you didn't have a dead-line to begin with anyway) then a project can grow and grow and grow. So as it happens this was a perfect project for me because I had already done a lot of physics (mechanics) work. The physics engine that I was writing was more complex though and the main work in getting the physics of Emotion to work, was in stripping-out the unnecessary stuff from my existing physics engine so that it would work in just a 2D plane and so that it would be fast enough to get a reliable 50fps or 60fps. The most fun bit to program in this game was the stretchy and saggy elastic graphics... I was toying with whether to try it or not because it's one of those things that can take a lot longer that you think and we only had five weeks to finish the whole demo initially. But I tried it and it worked practically first time and looked very effective...even considering I had very few polygons to play with because resources were tight. Think how beautiful the same concept would look on a current day system with loads more polygons and high res. Unlike with my snow-balling project we finished release one of Emotion in the allotted time of 5 weeks ready for prospective publishers to see... the graphics have been tweaked and so on since then but essentially the game was all there from the off. Then....then... a whole lot of pain followed -- mainly the pain of waiting and of dashed hopes after various fallen through deals with this and our other Darkhex demos....I expect it is the same kind of experience for novelists when they finish their book and excitedly send off their manuscrip to publishers. So here it is....we almost forgot about it all together, such was our mental block of the traumatic period it kicked-off. So as soon as it occured to us that our little ol' game was sitting there unreleased, unplayed, and unloved, we raced to make a few last mods and a few more levels and get it out there to whoever wanted it. Thanks to all the Yarozers who gave us encouragement during those days when Matt, Marc and me were waiting for publishers to get back to us on this and other demos...I hope you enjoy playing this living piece of that history. credits ------- code/gfx/sfx: Jon Prestidge Matt Verran contact and more fun stuff: http://www.hermitgames.com http://www.technospective.co.uk disclaim: This is a demo only. We make no claim to the E-Motion name or concept, this is merely our interpretation of E-Motion on the Playstation one.