More than a month since the last update? What happened!?
Well, “Alien Intruder” is progressing nicely: I have 25 stages ready –including playtesting–, and everything else is more or less in place.
The current TODO list is reasonable:
- At least another tileset (two ideally), so we can get to
50stages with some variability to the eye. - Likely another enemy, to make the stages
30to40more interesting. - High score table, because this is an arcade game and chasing score is part of it.
- The music, at least: the menu tune, in game, game over, and stage clear. I could also change the tune every 10 stages, but it depends on inspiration writing!
- Some more testing!
So is not that much, is it? The engine has been finished for the last month and I have fixed a handful of bugs that necessarily would appear when designing and playtesting the stages, although the “problem” are usually those bugs that don’t present themselves as part of this process, and that’s why we need testing.
I still need to learn to use the Reality AdLib Tracker v2, although I went down a rabbit hole with the music player and I ended implementing a DRO player, so In theory I can use anything that generates AdLib audio and can be captured by DosBox.
There was also a lot of polishing, from improving the asset management –that looks like I almost reimplemented the WAD format–, better memory allocation and far pointer support –ah, isn’t DOS 16-bit fun?–, and small things like saving the joystick calibration to disk.
Anyway, I keep posting updates in my mastodon account –that, by the way, I have moved from SDF; but that is probably a story for a different day–.