The secret project is not secrete any more, and has a name: Hyperdrive.
I’m officially working on an vertical scroller shooter for the Amstrad CPC, targeting 64K and CPC+ cartridges –without any CPC+ specific features for now– and the Dandanator. So far it has been tested on emulators (CPC+ on CPCEC and WinAPE, Dandanator on RVM2 and CPCEC), and my Amstrad CPC 464 using the CPR file and the M4 add-on.
I don’t like games that put technical excellence over gameplay, but for now the highlight is smooth one pixel scroll at 25Hz, and hopefully the fun gameplay will come later. My own Uchussen Gamma is going to be an important influence, of course, as well as the graphic style of Dawn of Kernel.
Hyperdrive's menu (WIP)
So far I’ve been focusing on the core, that is close to be completed. After that I will start with the first round of optimizations to see how far I can get in number of simultaneous sprites on screen –on my initial tests it was 9 8x16 masked sprites, which may not be enough–, and then enemy and level design.
This is not my first SHMUP, and I already know how to do a lot of complicated things that were new to me when I made Uchussen Gamma, but the Mode 0 resolution with 2:1 pixels has some challenges –that I apparently avoided in Dawn of Kernel–.
Besides the usual updates on Twitter, there’s a thread in CPC Wiki forum.