Here's the rub ; the arcade game Gorf never had a good port to a home system of any kind. Rights to produce this arcade title were sold to different companies. Coleco released one for its ColecoVision console and a really terrible one for the Atari 2600 or 'VCS' was made by CBS Electronics. An outfit named Roklan produced a home computer version for Atari 400/800 computers and the Commodore 64. The original arcade game featured five missions (levels) but no home system version had more than four. Always missing was the third mission; the Galaxians mission. I believe this might have something to do with the fact that Atari Corp. had the rights to produce all home versions of the Galaxians video game and competitive companies were really 'sue-crazy' at the time.

So, I've set out to correct this injustice perpetrated onto the video game player. But as I started coding my solution, I thought, "Why stop there? Instead, why not make a better video game with more than five missions?!" Along the way, I've also devised some additional features which should make this one into a new classic.

I decided to go with a multiple shot approach similiar to the firing mechanism of Galaga. It's not so much that I hated the Quark mechanism of Gorf, rather I like the shot firing of Galaga more than Gorf, Galaxian or Space Invaders. Furthermore, because I intend to have more vicious enemy waves than any of these games, I enlarged the width of the player's shot to represent a twin laser shot.

Here I'm interested in the ability for the invading aliens to be able to be replenished should the game become too easy with the limited number of them which show up at the beginning of the wave. I'm going to use an animated beam to spit them from a saucer sprite.

The original Gorf game just cycled through the same five missions. Each time five missions were completed, the player had his rank increased, beginning with the rank of Space Cadet, Space Captain, Space Colonel, etc. I view this arrangement as being rather boring so I will be eliminating the ranking system and simply keep track of how many missions have been completed instead. Furthermore, although I wish to revisit some of the same levels' with increasing difficulties, I'm also interested in introducing new enemies and missions to 'stir up trouble' for the player and keep the game interesting. I imagine a game with at least thirty unique levels. Then, with variations on those, it should be fairly easy to come up with close to a hundred missions.

I'm also going to be having some fairly good transitions between levels involving rotation of the background graphic and 'over-thrusting' of the ship's engines. I'm kindof a fan of Battlestar Galactica's crappy over-used Viper ship effects and may favor to the cheesy side to drive that theme home.

I'm not a big fan of single in-place sprite explosions. Explosions in Gorf itself aren't very impressive although they are better those found in Space Invaders and the Galaxians. My idea of good explosions were all made by one company's games: Williams Electronics. Robotron, Defender, Stargate and Sinistar all featured excellent particle explosions. Currently, I have some animation going with explosions but I need to code more to come up with the perfect set of explosions for this game.