Donkey Kong Remixed

[marinomitch13]

If you practice dealing with them (the best way being the WBH) and come to know their precise nature you will almost never run into an unsurvivable situation.

"Almost never" my butt.

Seriously, just practice the WBH. Once you can survive all parts of the barrel board to a high degree of consistency (excluding getting to the 2nd girder -which is a pretty difficult section, but would never be an issue in the other versions due to the first barrels being forced), then you're probably set for anything DK throws at you in normal or remixed DK.

Bonus: Practice doing the WBH taking only the short ladders.

[Sock Master]

I've updated the demo with some changes that might help make the elevator rivets board a bit more survivable.

I also added more layout variation and *slightly* easier L=3&4 wild barrels to the girder board.   I'm not sure I like the layout variations and might just remove them, though.

I think that's about all I could do for that rivets board, so that'll probably be it for that one.

[Sock Master]

Sometimes I just miss the obvious..  I figure I should look into fixing some of DK's scoring inconsistencies in DKRemix.

example: If you jump over two fireballs in the girder screen, you get 300 points.
              If you jump over two fireballs in any other screen ... you get 100 points.

It'd make sense if it allowed scoring multiples throughout.

Are there any other similar issues that bother people?

[ChrisP]

I love the two new ladders and the reversing elevator in the new rivet stage. The two ladders on the top in particular make a BIG difference for dealing with fireballs up there. It seems a lot more fair. The "sitting duck zone" is still going to be an issue sometimes, but there's only so much tinkering you can do before it would just start making a mess of everything.

Interesting about getting combo-leech points on the other boards. That, along with triples now being worth 800 points, is definitely going to make for some interesting scoring dynamics on this game.

[marinomitch13]

Are there any other similar issues that bother people?

I don't recall... did you say you made jumping over 3 barrels worth 800?

I think it'd be cool to extrapolate it further in some way for 4, 5, and 6 barrels.

[tilt]

Are there any other similar issues that bother people?

I don't recall... did you say you made jumping over 3 barrels worth 800?

I think it'd be cool to extrapolate it further in some way for 4, 5, and 6 barrels.

This, so many times 

[Sock Master]

I'm still digging into the code, but it's pretty obvious that the combo scoring on the girders stages was not originally written into the game.  It's a hack that was added afterwards, probably by Nintendo without the ability to re-assemble the program, rather than Ikegami who had the source code.     

It uses a modified version of a clone of the original routine which is also used for detecting hammer hits and death collisions.   So now I have to figure out how to unify this stuff nicely without also breaking hammer and death collision detection in the process.


As for 4,5,6.. combo bonuses.. Yes and no.  It could be done, but there aren't any sprites that could be used to display higher bonuses on-screen.  There are only the 100,200,300,500 and 800 sprites.   It doesn't seem like there's any easy way to work around that.

[WCopeland]

Jumping three barrels should not award 800 points. It should award 500 and show the correct sprite.

[ChrisP]

Jumping three barrels should not award 800 points. It should award 500 and show the correct sprite.

I think it's time DKF had an all-out debate about which was the actual intent here.

Wes is apparently in the same camp I am (that the typo was actually the sprite location reference, not the score value).

Dean, who is on the other side, made a good point about this the other night though: if it was meant to be 500, the "800" sprite would have been noticed and caught in testing. It would have been hard to miss (whereas the score going up by 500 would have been easy to miss).

On the other hand, I believe that the typo (sprite location "#7F" rather than "#7E") would have been much easier to make than accidentally typing "#05" when "#08" was the intention. But I don't know, as I have no clue what sort of programming tools they were using.

I am torn...

[Sock Master]

My opinion is that it was intended to be 800.  A 3 barrel jump was expected to be much less likely, therefore score higher.    I do think this will always be a divided issue, though.

On the other hand, this game is a remix.  The rules could be anything - add blue hammers that you can jump with?  Why not.

From my point of view, 800 for 3 barrels is good because it's going to tempt players to push their luck.   It pushes that risk vs. reward button nicely.

Either way, there's some good news.   If 800 is *not* used for 3.. that opens it up for being used for 4 barrel jumps.  And that... would also push that risk vs. reward temptation.

[ChrisP]

Just wanted to run an idea by you:

The bonus life award in DK has always struck me as kind of silly. The scoring thresholds are too low, and too close to one another. Seems like a waste of dipswitch options to have 7K/10K/15K/20K as the cutoffs.

Here's what I'm thinking: as I play this, having only seen 2 of the boards, it's clear to me that getting through 117 boards on 3+1 settings is going to be extraordinarily tough, if not impossible. A lot of the difficulty here is going to come down to nasty randomness that there's not going to be any way to "out-skill" (especially on that new rivet board!)

I think for our "official" competition settings, we're gonna want to play with more lives, to offset some of that bad luck. D2K standard is 6 men, and it plays really well that way due to "clock screwings" on the later refinery boards, so I think there's a solid precedent here.

But how about we have some fun with the extra man dipswitches? I'm thinking, keep the standard 7K award, but also have options for extras every 150K, or maybe 200K, with no limit (even with a 1M run you would still only get a maximum of 5 or 6 extras total before the KS, which would be 8 or 9 men in all, same as simply setting it for 9 to start).

I just like the idea of official competition settings being 3 men + 1 every 'x' amount of points, and having to actually fight deeper and deeper into the game to get all of your potential lives. It would add a whole new dimension of excitement, to, for example, be on your last man with no reserve, and knowing that you're only 10K from another man.

It also seems like it's probably (?) a really easy change to implement.

Any thoughts?

[Sock Master]

I think it's a good idea.  The existing bonus life dip switch options are essentially pointless - they're all pretty much the same thing.

I do like the idea of having one setting that only gives just one bonus life.  But the other 3 could have different repeating spreads.

As far as I can estimate, scoring will still be similar to original DK but a bit higher due to hammers on the alternate elevators stage, jump with hammer giving more reach, the extra bonus stages, and slightly increased spawn rates later on.   Rough guestimate maybe 1,800,000 max attainable score??

The death rate may seem like it'll be high, but it's tricky to tell because optimal strategies haven't necessarily been discovered yet.

Maybe something like:
-10,000 points only
-15,000 points and every 150,000 points
-25,000 points and every 250,000 points
-35,000 points and every 350,000 points

A player could (fairly) quickly discover what the machine they stepped up to is set at.  The first extra life is easy for casual players, the rest more difficult but covering a fairly wide range because we don't know what the ideal setting would be.

Opinions?

In other news, I got 1,2,3 and 4 barrel/etc.. combo jumps implemented across all screens.   100, 300, 500 and 800 points.    That also means silly things like a DK + fireball combo leech, or spring + fireball combo leech = 300 points, in addition to the actual purpose of being able to jump over 4 things at once for 800 points.

[WCopeland]

I think those additional leeches might be good for the game, as they would probably wind up raising the skill ceiling. I can picture patterns being devised for rivet boards that would be designed to let you both leech the leg and a fireball simultaneously.

[LMDAVE]

Jumping three barrels should not award 800 points. It should award 500 and show the correct sprite.

I think it's time DKF had an all-out debate about which was the actual intent here.

Wes is apparently in the same camp I am (that the typo was actually the sprite location reference, not the score value).

Dean, who is on the other side, made a good point about this the other night though: if it was meant to be 500, the "800" sprite would have been noticed and caught in testing. It would have been hard to miss (whereas the score going up by 500 would have been easy to miss).

On the other hand, I believe that the typo (sprite location "#7F" rather than "#7E") would have been much easier to make than accidentally typing "#05" when "#08" was the intention. But I don't know, as I have no clue what sort of programming tools they were using.

I am torn...

Yeah, I agree with that logic that if it wasn't intended to be 800 it would have been caught immediately from the sprite. Also, 500 is not much of an award from 300. You're tripling your 100 award for double barrels to 300, so 800 is a fair award for triple, and as rare as 4 objects are, it should be about 1200-1600 if there was not a max on object jumps.

[Sock Master]

I've posted up one last version of the barrels+spring, rivets+elevators DKRemix demo.   It's getting difficult to maintain the same code revisions across both demo and the full build.  And I think that's it for tweaks to those stages anyway.

What's new:
-Combo jumps for up to 4 objects.  100,300,500 & 800 points.
-Combo jumps in all boards, not just barrels.
-Can now earn more than 1 extra life (as described in my last post.)
-Barrel boards occasionally have blue hammers now (this might be removed, but I wanted to try it.)
-You can jump onto the spring on the barrel board.  You still die, but in a more interesting way.