Preface: I'm currently blind drunk...
Quote: "Only problem I have is with the sprites. The sprite movement is smooth, but about once every second they appear to jump forward a few pixels, then jump back again."
This is most likely background tasks on your computer, although Asteroids will play at the same speed on all machines there is no framerate dampening so any minor spike in system performance will echo through to the smoothness of the game.
Perhaps in a future patch this will get changed.
Quote: "I like the load screen. Nice job"
Quote: "I agree with Sonic about the backgrounds. Far too bright for me "
They're there to look pretty, and I think they do the job well - but to be honest anything I put in the background is going to detract from the game which is why I made them optional. They are also a massive framerate hit.
During development I was actually playing an episode of Buck Rogers via an .avi as the background image. It was quaint, but implausable. However that idea did lead to us doing our first game cinematic for the Asteroids intro
I also had for a while a Star Wars fan film called Beer Wars (downloadable from http://www.theforce.net) which really has to be seen to be belived.
If you go there, I also recommend Pink Five, although it never made 'Asteroids Background' status it is a blinding example of a Star Wars fan film.
There is another film I also highly recommend, although I can't remember the name, but the premise is the film is an advert to join the Imperial army - it's a class piece of 3D film making, and if you are on broadband and in your 20's or 30's you are doing yourself an injustice if you havn't seen it.
Quote: "I like the level where the asteroids lined up across the screen. Reminded me of the spiked barrels (? It’s been so long…) in Super Stardust. "
The inspiration was Tetris, I originally had an easier version of that level earlier on in the game but Nick hates it and asked me to remove it completely but I liked it, so knowing that Nick isn't too hot at playing arcade games I snuck it in near the end
Pneumatic Dryll
