A8 :: Blending into the picture

Whoops, forgot to update the dev blog... i've had a bit of a "coders block" as Kenz put it, so there hasn't been any progress on the remaining couple of levels for Co-Axis 2189 - i know a few people are "champing at the bit" to play the thing (and everybody who had a go at Fusion seemed to enjoy themselves) but i'm fairly adamant that i'll get the bugger right before releasing the final version... that will be this year and hopefully next month at the latest, but in the meantime i've taken a few steps away from it to try clearing my head; to that end, i've been doing an Atari 8-bit puzzle game.

At the moment, it doesn't have an official name but it's pretty much based on the old MSN game Blender where pictures are displayed, then shuffled around and the player is tasked with chosing pairs of blocks to swap in order to get the original image back; right now i have the core of the code running, so single games can be played and the game knows when a picture has been restored and, since i'm not using a common or garden resolution for the pictures (more on that later when i have examples) there was a day of writing a converter in Blitz Max that takes bitmap files that adhere to certain rules and converts them into something my code can display. The "to do" list right now is getting a couple of pictures arranged (preferably three, i'm not sure why but two seems too little but three is enough... odd that), working on some compression to get everything wedged into the Atari and then building the presentation code around what is already there so that games go from title page to main game and back.