Spectrum :: Steel Force released

A little development sidetrack this time; Steel Force was developed with Jonathan Cauldwell's Shoot 'Em Up Designer whilst i was writing a review of it for Retro Gamer issue 52; it's a single level, horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up and i've tarted it up with a surround and a simple (in other words, BASIC) title page. It's on my personal site for download and here are a couple of screenshots for good measure; hopefully someone'll enjoy the thing even if it's pretty simple... =-)

PC :: Oops, sidetracked!

Spent part of today working out how to produce something similar to the alien release scheduling engine (or A.R.S.E. for short... you should see some of the comments in my source!) from Charge Armada in Blitz Max and, generally speaking, things went pretty well; i now have a similar scripting language, but with up to thirty two moves per nasty (the C64 version only has eight), each object contains a unique set of commands rather than having the wave data and object move data seperate and all the movement stuff is optimised in that i can terminate a move sequence and wrap to the start early. In fact, the only thing it hasn't either got or improved upon is the death inheritance system that CA has, that's partly because explosions are handled independently to the nasty object system on the PC and partly due to the new format for the object data but i'm considering ways to add it if the need is there...

i haven't entirely decided what to actually do with the engine yet, but there's always the ShmupDev rapid prototyping "compo" perhaps... how to make a shoot 'em up where the ship can't fire, i wonder!