The Development of Robotron
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The Development of Robotron
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Re: The Development of Robotron
#2An office where I once worked had an arcade cabinet and we developed a little rivalry to see who could reach 1,000,000 points in Robotron first. I never quite made it -- topped out around 900,000 or so. The game required an intense kind of zen focus, and every time I got close to the goal I could feel that concentration slip ever so slightly, just enough for the game's later screens to sap my remaining lives.
Re: The Development of Robotron
#3> we spent four out of the six months of Robotron’s development PLAYING the thing
Wait, what? You didn't create epics and attach story points to all of your JIRA tickets and estimate your development time down to the nearest 15-minute increment before you wrote a single line of code? Preposterous, you could never develop functioning software without pre-planning each and every single hour in a spreadsheet and reporting your status to a project manager in one hour daily standup meetings every morning.
Re: The Development of Robotron
#4This is available on archive.org to play in the browser.
It's the most like riding a bike of any video game I've ever played. One hand chooses shooting direction, other hand independently moves the character in a direction. Even by the 4th level there are too many enemies to track.
I basically got crushed until my independent hand coordination "clicked in," then started progressing to much further levels without any clear strategy.
Maybe that's how most people play video games, but I usually have some mental model of the game, techniques to try to improve, etc. Here it's just getting creamed for awhile, then a sudden change to "aaaaaaaaaaah," for longer and longer periods of time. :)
Edit: clarification
Re: The Development of Robotron
#5An office where I once worked had an arcade cabinet and we developed a little rivalry to see who could reach 1,000,000 points in Robotron first. I never quite made it -- topped out around 900,000 or so. The game required an intense kind of zen focus, and every time I got close to the goal I could feel that concentration slip ever so slightly, just enough for the game's later screens to sap my remaining lives.
Yep, zen-like.
I never played this one in the arcades because it ate my quarters: only gave me 30 seconds of fun for each one.
When I built a full-size MAME machine with dual joysticks, Robotron quickly became my go to.
I pushed my games out from that 30 seconds to maybe 3 minutes. But what a three minutes! I always feel a kind of release after — like flipping a table or something.
Re: The Development of Robotron
#6"It was based in Dresden and employed 68,000 people (1989)."
Wonder if more people think about Robotron-the game vs. Robotron-the company (and all their products).
Re: The Development of Robotron
#7This is available on archive.org to play in the browser. It's the most like riding a bike of any video game I've ever played. One hand chooses shooting direction, other hand independently moves the character in a direction. Even by the 4th level there are too many enemies to track. I basically got crushed until my independent hand coordination "clicked in," then started progressing to much further levels without any…
> Even by the 4th level there are too many enemies to track.
I love this game. The flashing colors are very stimulating, but the beauty of this game is that it's about judging tradeoffs in a constantly changing environment.
Yes, starting at the 4th wave there are too many enemies to track. The zen of the game is this: you will lose some lives every wave after a certain point. But the game is generous and you will earn bonus lives every X points.
The wandering humans in the game give you 5000 points each, but only after you save 5 in a row. You can rack up extra lives pretty quickly if you can waver through the robots and obstacles and hit 5+ in a row.
So you have always think - will this path through the changing morass enable me to save a large enough chain of wandering humans to gain more lives than I'll lose? You have to constantly make "business decisions" to keep your profits (total lives) ahead of a fatal loss (your last life).
Not that I can get past wave 14 or 15 though.
Re: The Development of Robotron
#8Eugene Jarvis gave an in-depth Robotron development postmortem talk at GDC 2014.
It covers a lot more than TFA, though I appreciated the scanned photos.
Re: The Development of Robotron
#9I built a MAME box recently and specifically purchased a dual-joystick (X-Arcade) so I could play Robotron.
It's still fun. Love the graphics, it creates an exciting environment that is claustrophic.
Re: The Development of Robotron
#10One of the best games at the arcade when I was growing up.