[MrD]

Thanks for playing my game!

I've tested both versions of this on some of the Amigas here in the office. In the newer version it looks like the bug where the ship gets stuck beyond the side of the screen is fixed since I can navigate my way back on-screen now.

I don't think I changed that at all. The ship was always free to move beyond the level edges and fly around in the infinite area, but the ship's sprite will stop when it hits the 'edges'. When you're outside, it'll look stuck. When you cross back into the level, the ship will snap back into motion. Stay near the land!

I couldn't find the slow area in level 3, and I was playing this on an A500 with 512kb ChipRAM and 512kb FastRAM, so maybe that's fixed too, I'm not sure.

Unfortunately not. The old level 3 is the new level 9, and slow area remains. It's around here:


It's only noticeable when you're carrying the box. The problem is that there's too many collision lines in that cell of the level. This has now been fixed!

Nice to see the floppy drive light doesn't stay on now, that was a bit odd before.

"Don't thank me, thank the Moon's gravitational pull." Or these guys!

I noticed one tiny glitch when I was carrying the box back on the second level, a single line of pixels about an inch or two wide flashed at the top-right corner of the screen. It didn't interfere with anything, it's just something I noticed.

That'll be an oddity from the timing of my tile drawing. That's since been fixed, as the tile drawing's been retimed and made much more logical.

Something that would help to give a sense of movement when you're up in the "sky" is to have some background tiles behind, and since it's meant to be underground they could simply be darker dirt tiles that pass behind the ship as it flies around the caverns. If you don't have time to pixel any more tiles I'd be very happy to help out.

The problem is that there's not very many colours. I'm using two 8-colour playfields, one for the level tiles and one for the sprite-like objects. Darker dirt tiles would look near identical to foreground tiles. I think it's best that I'm consistent with what is and isn't land, with purple being passable and brown impassible.

I'm not using the hardware sprites currently and there's probably all kinds of Clever Copperlist Stuff I could do to have something more helpful in the background. Putting things in the sky is a graphical thing that's at the very bottom of the list of things to improve.

As for the title screen, what colour mode is it in? Are you slicing the image and changing the palette a few times down the screen? Have you tried seeing how it looks in HAM mode, or High Res Interlace? I could whip up some examples using different ideas if you'd like.

It's a 32 colour image with 7 horizontal slices giving 161 distinct colours. I haven't tried any high res modes yet.

When I was first putting the title in, I had a go at converting my original truecolour image into HAM(5?/6?) using a program called 'generalised bitmap module'. The best I could get it looking was this:

I decided to stick to the dithered version!

That title screen needs to be chucked completely and the image redrawn in the simpler style of the old Zeppelin titles. (working on this!)

I'm still improving GB but it's mostly been behind the scenes stuff: The collision has been improved, the tile drawing has been sped up, the copperlist generation has been sped up, the memory usage has been vastly reduced (now uses a copper split for the display), it's HD installable properly and has safe highscore saving. And hopefully the music won't be nicked from the first page of unexotica!