Hi everyone,
The Odyssey doesn't have game cartridges but it does have something that looks similar, cards (sometimes called carts). One of the first "head-trips" when encountering the console is that these cards are not games but rather pluggable circuit boards that change the behaviour of the console and controllers. There are about 12 cards for the system and all the games use them.
Today's update brings Card 6 emulation to Magnavody. During development I uncovered a whole aspect to the console that I had not been aware of. The RESET button on each controller has TWO states: Pressed down and released. Up until Card 6 I was treating the RESET button as a single event, "pressed". That worked pretty well for the other cards and the games I knew about but for Card 6, holding down the RESET button is an important element of gameplay. It hides the player's spot. How cool is that? I'm aware of X-Men, the 1993 MegaDrive game that required players to press the reset button, but I'm not really aware of any of games and consoles where it was so happily integrated into the system.
Card 6 is used by classic games "Roulette" and "States". It is a pretty unique card. It hides the Player 1 spot, the wall and the ball. Only the Player 2 spot is on the screen. Holding RESET button hides the spot. Releasing the RESET button will "snap" the spot from off screen to the on screen location.
That's not the only update. The settings menu has been reworked to add more UI options, settings are now saved and there's some other small quality of life improvements.
Thanks for supporting Magnavody.
Regards,
Luke Miller
Changelog
- NEW CARD: Card 6 - No ball, no wall, no Player 1. Player 2 spot hides when reset button is held down and snaps when released.
- Add support for holding down reset button on controllers
- Add support for hiding player spots.
- Add support for snapping player spots from off-screen to their current location.
- Add new options in settings for hiding different on screen UI elements
- Update to Godot 4.3.x
- Change minimum ball speed to 0.01 (allowing it to be set to zero made the ball not move which might confuse newbies)