Some beta testing on a new eagerly awaited Elk game this morning and this afternoon spending some time on Astoraid. Play area is 64 x 64 sectors containing 32 asteroids, but you don't know where they are to start with. The "scan" screen lets you find them :) Asteroids contain different things...

Some more "trying things out" 😀 The dev environment now has stars and the scan screen shows the locations of things. Plan is to get some of the gameplay elements tested out and then start porting the code over to 6502.

A day off work, so a little "fun" work instead :) Getting various plotting routines working in the dev mode and decided to go for a retro TV look ;) I've also worked on some more gameplay stuff including a map/scanner screen mock up that might make it in next. Oh and say hello to one of the aliens.

Another first for me - particle systems :) I wanted to see what the player jets would look like with particles instead of cycling sprites so used my dev system to try particles out. This is displaying a maximum of 16 particles at a time, I like the effect but wonder if it will be possible in 6502..

"Astoraid" but not running on an emulator/real hardware. I've created a mini dev environment using JavaScript + an HTML Canvas that lets me try things out much more quickly than writing lots of 6502. I have a library of routines that mimic the real hardware so the code is close to what it will be...

Video 2 shows the same thing but with the game code running from SWRAM. I was expecting to gain a few more cycles than this, but anything extra is useful :)

Experimenting with SWRAM use for "Astoraid". Video 1 shows normal mode, you can see I've almost run out of CPU for drawing anything more by the position of the "red" debug background colour.

Some more "Astoraid" time this afternoon - the stars now move in the appropriate direction :) I'm not sure about the speed yet, it feels a little too fast at "maximum speed" but this can be tweaked later on. The code is *very* un-optimized at the moment so I might need to spend some time here soon.

And starfield part 1 is working, a few "smoke & mirrors" here as it always moves at the moment, I wanted to test the effect though :) It might not move this fast eventually - it will depend on what it looks like when other things are also moving.

More progress on Astoraid (formerly known as "Game 2") I was meant to be working on a starfield and/or asteroid plotting so heres a video showing the game logo and playing area borders 😆 The playing area may end up shrinking depending on whether I can fit the various bits of status text it will need

A little more progress on "Game 2". I have the drawing and animation of player "jet exhausts" and "scans" working and added the asteroid plotting routine today. Currently have 4 separate sprite routines, you can never have too many 😜

Finally some progress with "game #2". I've spent a lot of time (2 months!) drawing/re-drawing the player sprite and just not getting anything that I was happy with so I went back to my original (from April) and am going with that for now. Testing keyboard rotation of the player ship.

Here's a video of a "boss battle" from Apache Canyon, these get progressively harder each time you meet a boss as its shields increase so although this one looks easy this isn't the case later on. Anyone who grew up in the 80s might recognise the fanfare from a 1980s helicopter themed TV show :)