GFKAEV^‡

Items in bold are more recent.

Here's the list of what I've done so far:

• When you fly into the guard band (see below) such that your craft is no longer on the screen, a marker appears pointing where you are. As you get closer to the edge it changes from yellow to red.
• Changed the way lasers are handled so that all other weapons can be treated the same (i.e. lasers are treated exactly the same as, say, missiles - they just look different, move faster, and do a different amount of damage).
• Added "dumb" missiles which just fly straight. Since the missile starts out moving at the same velocity as you it's a bit difficult to hit things when you're flying fast. That's fine by me - makes things more challenging :)
• Changed the thrust sprite on your craft. It now has a left and right thrust sprite which act independently. This means when you turn left, the right thruster fires, and vice-versa. Also got rid of the smoke since we're not using combustible fuel here.
• Created menu system. It can handle: submenus, toggle switches (ex. sound fx on/off), slider bars (ex. music volume), and button input (for controller configuration). Will add more functionality as needed.
• Started work on the shop screen. In between certain levels you'll have the opportunity to upgrade your craft with money you find during the level. All graphics are placeholders for the moment.
• Integrated the menu system with the shop screen.
• Added moons to the planets. Each planet can have several moons. The moons revolve around the planets, rotate and exert their own gravity.
• Added suns. They have gravity which is several times that of the planets. Also, the sun casts shadows on all the planets in the appropriate directions. Eventually they will affect the temperature of your craft.
• Increased the scale of planets. Otherwise the turrets look too large compared to them.
• Instead of crashing when you collide with a planet, you now skip off, taking damage to your shield. Of course if your shield is down you'll still crash...
• Added a 100 pixel guard band around the perimeter of the playfield. That way if you fly off the side of the screen you don't die right away, but have a chance to get back.
• Added sound!!!
• The player now explodes when destroyed.
• Added fire and smoke when you thrust.
• Shields now recharge. If an object gets hit enough such that it's shield drops, it will slowly charge back up. After the shield energy reaches a certain threshold it will turn back on.
• Added pieces of scrap which fly off a turret when hit (after the shield has been drained of course)
• When the turrets explode there are a couple of explosion sprites and a few large pieces of scrap go flying away. As a neat after-effect, the large pieces of scrap explode into several smaller pieces after a time delay. It doesn't affect anything, but it looks cool.
• Each planet can come in 5 different sizes - and thus 5 different gravity strengths. Also each can use any one of 6 different CLUTs. I plan on having 8 different planet graphics so this leads to 8 * 5 * 6 or 240 possible planets. The different CLUTs have no actual affect on gameplay - they're just there so you don't see the same planets over and over.
• I significantly increased the quality of the planet graphics. I had bought that Texture Universe CD when I got the Yaroze and figured this was a good way to finally use it. By applying a mineral, dirt, or organic texture to a sphere's surface it looks convincingly like a planet.
• I restructured my code to make it more viable to create a level editor.
• A two-level parallax background has been added. Rather than use the GsBG method (since I could never get that to work) I just use sprites.
• Added a module which prints any text string on the screen. You can play all sorts of funky tricks with the letters. I will use this for the intro sequence and for beginning of level messages.
• Player and turret shields added (with crappy hand-drawn art)
• If a player/turret gets hit and still has enough shield energy left to absorb the damage then only the shield is displayed.
• If the shield is low on power (or has no power) then an explosion is shown and damage is done to the target.
• Collision detection for laser beams added
• Turrets rotate to face the player and fire when facing it
• Implemented a table for the various types of turrets. That way I can have one turret which rotates quickly, but fires slowly; or another which rotates slowly but has a powerful laser; etc.
• Note that any laser can hit any target once fired. So if you fly between two turrets correctly, they could both fire at you, miss, and end up hitting each other.
• Created new object for enemy turrets
• Player can now fire laser
• Added HUD to show vectors for movement, thrust, and gravity
• Player can rotate and thrust
• Collision detection for the player hitting planets added
• Objects exert appropriate gravity on the player
• Menu at beginning of level lets you select angle and power
• Screen scrolls when actual playfield is larger than screen size
• Objects display on screen

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