The prototype before the final prototype

Charged shots

I’ve implemented one of the last few missing game mechanics: Charged shots!

The fire button can now be held to charge the shot. After a set time, the shot is fully charged and deals more damage.

More fleshed out boss

The boss enemy now has a set of attacks at it’s disposal: A sweeping shot, a star-like shot and a spread shot. It even moves around from time to time.

In addition, it takes control of the camera to ensure a smooth experience.

Technical difficulties: Sound

I’ve started adding sound effects to different actions. However, I’ve encountered two snags while doing that.

The first one is actually simple: The DOS port does not support sound effects at all currently. There is support for CDDA audio (entirely unused for now), but PCM sound effects are just not implemented. I’ll need to do that.

The second one actually appears to be a bug. The SDL2 port does play sounds, but will only play them once. I have a vague idea what might be going wrong, but haven’t fixed anything yet.

I’ve decided to disable sound effects for now. Both issues will need to be fixed for the next release.

Visuals

Just a small thing: The player’s ship now has a tiny thrust flame behind it, indicating it’s speed.

Being invincible after getting hit is also now visually carried out through blinking.

Future plans

There will be yet another prototype. I plan for that to be the last one. A list of things I want to see there are:

• Full support for PCM sound effects on DOS and SDL2
• Support for analog controls on PSX
• Rework entity construction to avoid loading screens between waves
• Fix the long standing texture mapping offset bug in software renderer
• Maybe improve win32 opengl11 performance

After that, I would like to transition the game into what I call the preview phase. I plan to add actual content there: Have an introduction, a proper stage, a proper progression and over all tie together all the things I’ve considered for this game. There will also be some new things you haven’t seen yet.

At the end of the preview phase, the game will be a in a roughly playable and (hopefully) kind of fun state with one full stage, including a boss. After that there remains some fine-tuning of gameplay and visuals - and that will be it!