
To: Purple Hampton, Atari Corp		FAX: +1 408-745-8861
From: Michael Beaton			FAX: +44 482-573136


Hi Purple,


As ideas for improving gameplay are flying thick & fast, here are
three of my own which you might like to run by the game design crew
over there:


1) to give progressive difficulty as you get further from the game
start point, make the number of aliens on levels 1 to 5 go something
like:
  	level 1: 150
	level 2: 100
	level 3: 50
	level 4: 100
	level 5: 150


2) if Mike Pooler has the time to insert a difficulty level selection
screen, then it would be very easy for us to implement this by simply
multiplying the standard number of random aliens on each level by a
difficulty scale, e.g. 1/2 for easy, 1 for standard and 1 1/2 for hard.
By the way, I know that the difference between 1/2, 1 and 1 1/2 sounds
like quite a lot: it would mean, e.g., 50, 100 or 150 aliens, but actaully
you need big changes like that for the difference to be obvious straight
away to the player.

A similar point about big changes applies to Lance's idea about the
Predator score. I would like to see the different scores for different
vision modes, but the percentages need to be more like 50%, 75% and 100%
if we want it to make a real difference to game-players.


3) I had an idea that we could use the charge bars on the alien and
predator weapons, what happens is that each time you use a weapon the
charge drops by a fixed amount, so if you use it a lot, like about
20 times in a row, then the charge will sink to more or less zero, but
what happens is that while you are not using the weapons, the charge
goes back up again slowly, so that after not too long it's fully
charged again. The damage a weapon does depends on the charge, so it
never really gets to completely unavailable, because it's always
recharging, but still if you use one attack continuously without letting
it recharge, then it will become pretty feeble.
This idea would force players to use all their array of weapons and
it would mimic the effect of a real person using up their own strength.


Let me know what you think,



Mike.
