C64 :: Ongoing project

i've decided to keep a development blog! i'm not entirely sure why i decided to, but it seemed like a good idea yesterday so here it is! My active projects tend to dot around quite a bit (something i'm attempting to keep under control with a relatively low degree of success), so there's a good chance this blog'll do the same but the more general waffling (at least after this general waffling) will mostly be reserved for my main blog. i'm going to prefix entries with a format and i might do something fun with the syndication to allow filtering for specific machines... if i get time.

So my ongoing C64 shoot 'em up... the name is almost settled and it's current status is that it scrolls 22 lines of the screen with 4x4 character tiles, has colour-per-tile colour scroll and at the moment only uses eight sprites; one for the player, one for a bullet and six for the nasties. The engine is being kept "generic" for the moment because, once i have the attack wave managers absolutely the way i want the things, i plan to "fork" the source off for a couple of other projects. Cheaty i know, but i don't usually rely on library source so it might be a good idea for me to start.

Yesterday saw a fairly major overhaul to the nasty object control stuff; after four or five hours rewriting large blocks of the existing code and swearing (planning ahead... something i've never been much cop at! =-) the objects have eight moves (previously it was just two) which are specified as speeds for X and Y and a duration. They can also be shielded and have the option to "mutate" into another object or simply explode when destroyed, which adds a lot of interesting possibilities... there aren't any real objects defined yet (because there aren't any sprites ready to install) but everything seems to be behaving so that's a small victory!