The background scrolling is now fully operational and reading data from a separate source file (the attack wave data has been split off in a similar way to make maintaining everything a little easier) – there aren’t any real background tiles yet however, i need to sit down and have a large graphics session.

This project has actually become a lot bigger than it was meant to, so i’ll possibly be starting a smaller one in the next few days to work on alongside it otherwise the idea behind this “quick production” label is getting somewhat lost!

The game’s framework is now all but complete; it even has the option of loading and saving highscores to teh internets (the code existed in the original version, but it’s been tidied until it works a bit more securely and the server side code improved as well). And for my next trick, the background scrolling needs to be taken care of…

Some revised graphics are in, including new explosions (i was previously using one that came with Blitz 2D), a player ship which is flipped and tinted for the nasties and assorted bullets. i pulled in a particle engine that was written for another unreleased Blitz 2D game, rewrote most of that and now the explosions are lovely and beefy!

Back when i first started writing PC games (there have been several projects started, but only a few completed and actually released under the Bullet Mechanics label) i was so taken by a demonstration version of Blitz BASIC 2D that i purchased the full product from then distributors Guildhall Leisure. But despite quite a bit of tinkering and a few useful utilities being built, no projects were actually completed and after spending quite a bit of time trying to simulate things that Blitz 2D simply wasn’t capable of handling such as transparency and alpha channels, i moved onwards and upwards to it’s sibling BlitzMax.

But that left a number of incomplete projects lying around in an old work directory, the Blitz 2D manual and CD sat on the pile of programming books by my desk and [comedy emotional moment] a hole, a void in fact that could only be filled by completing and more importantly releasing a game with Blitz 2D!

Enter revived project Yaseu, an acronym meaning Yet Another Shoot ‘Em Up and i’ll leave it to your imaginations what kind of game this is going to be. Whilst i’ve been waiting for the DNS entries for the Illogistix domain to propagate, a spare PC has been given a clean install of Windows, Blitz 2D and a few other tools and i’ve pulled the code for Yaseu apart, pretty much rewritten most of it, converted the subroutines to functions since that’s apparently the “Right Thing” to do and made a start on some graphics to boot.