A seasonal stop usually leaves to make place for a seasonal restart. Mike has decided that the moment has come. We're back on the track.

Well, to be precise, he is back on the track: we'd left the project when it should reach the release of a test suite, in order to let the players'audience adjust the difficulty level. To achieve that, Mike was facing his most frightful demon, in the shape of...yes: attack waves'design. I have to admit, it's a good reason to get a healthy pause.
About me, and strictly my own tasks, after the improvement to the walker sprite, I was blocked by the instances: there is no urge for a 2nd level's boss (which seems to be a harder job too), I still can't do anything useful for the 2nd level's background animation, due to the well known current limitations, we're so far away from the usefulness of a 3rd level's tune...what to do?

So Mike's back, and he quickly achieved some targeted features.
First of all, we had to change the panel's colors, because a most extended use of the videoram color would need a different contrast, because I implemented that colour as the midst luminance one. This change allowed to have a blue shield bar on the left, and a weapons powerbar on the right, which's splitted in two regions: if the player completes his money bag while the powerbar is in the green region, he improves his weapon, and the powerbar fully recharges; if in the red region, the powerbal is refueled only.

And now, for a nasty feature we all have both waited and feared: now the alien baddies shoot at you!
We have 8 slots for enemy bullets, so why don't spread this between turrets and baddies too? Now reaching the end of a level starts to become very difficult, because certain tunnels full of turrets and rows of enemies are now panic!

167! I fulfilled a whole sprites pack! Hey it's a goal!
Yes, beside adjusting some little refinements and chitchatting about how things have to work, I bagged all the needed in order to have a baddie capable to appear exactly in the dead angle of your eye, making the most with the infamous pods: they now appear from the shadows.

It's a 7 frames further consumption, the blank frame is the last one, #167, which will be used for several other nice features.

Of course, having a filled sprite pack doesn't mean that's will be the final sprites set for the level 1, but now I know I can build up one. To complete a good sprites showcase, I also reversed a couple of baddies, in order to have left-to-right attack waves too.

Ok, what now?
Well, we told you we're pointing to have a test level. This mainly means we only need code about weapon system, and baddies' attack waves. And we're very close to complete all of this!
But hey, wait a moment: why loosing time and gray matter in order to get closer to the player's whises regarding the baddies' habits, instead of allowign the user himself to built insert and play his own enemies'paths?
So, that's how it comes the idea to release a sort of...mmm..XeO3 Test Suite! With this one you will be able to draw your nastiest groups of attacking baddies, then compile the script in order to autoembed into the test level, hence play it! You will watch the stuff, finally, and everybody could contribute to the final version offering his best waves.

Making use of a large approximation in order to have yielding worktimes, we can assume we'll release XeO3 Test Suite (or how the heck it will be called) before xmas 2007. Well, I really hope "a lot before" but let's talk serious and secure. So wait for it, it's coming!

Little graphics improvements, combined with fundamental chitchattings about weapons and pickups.

Me and Mike had a decisive Messenger session, in order to reach a practicable solution for the weapons/pickups system, looking forward to a playable test level.
Several things has been refined, but the notable change is that the initial weapons now can be considered as a real 4th weapon which can be enhanced along 6 levels. Plain Shot's levels don't look different while changing level, nor they show progress in bullet's power: when enhanced, Plain Shot increases bullets on the screen, simply. Of course it means we need a new system sprite. One new, or maybe two, if we would have one more for the temporary invincibility.

Two sprites are just gone. In facts, I decided to add one frame to both the side shots pickups, and now their pickups look better.
Another little smoothing has been given to the level1 map. There were too many mines at a certain point, that make the gameplay to be too much claustrophobic. Hence, I dropped some...

Still no time and, most of all, no inspiration to face the frontend tune.
I'm currently scared: I have to come back to a SID editor after one year since my last composing, and I have to decide while composing that tune, which instruments can be commonly used and which have to be kept off. I also would like to keep the motif of 1st level, hence rewriting it using the new instruments.

Mike played a bit with the frontend, adding stars, subtracting stars, adding again and so on. He's moving so much, on several battlefronts: frontend, hiscore saver (with some precious help from TNT), and many other details. And my shame inflates...

Today, we had a fruitful brainstorming about a thorny part of the game: the pickup/weapons system.
Mike and I began our chatting with very distant ideas, and in the very end we got out with a very solid grub of the weapon system as it will be. Apart of some minor accomodations, this would be the XeO3's weapons system, roughly.
Picking weapons makes your weapon advance in level, than means more bullets and more power; but you have to pay to keep that level: a powerbar continuosly decreases, until it reaches zero and you regress one level, but you can refuel it collecting coins all around.
Yeah, you just figured it: one of the two twin energy bars, exactly the bar on the right, will be used as power indicator.

Next stop: weapons!

My god my god, Mike's running like a train, and keeping his tail is becoming harder! Two important features had been added in few hours into the code.

The first one is a starting point to the pickups and weapons system: destroying enemies makes big and small coin appear, jump for a while and then fall down. In the near future, collecting money will allow to enhance player's firepower.
You can read in the twin blog about all the coding behind it, but from my side I can tell you that Mike used some smart scripts more, in order to collect several baddies in single groups. That way, it's up to you to assign a single coin dropping to a specific enemy when shot down, or making a big one appears when a whole group of baddies had been nuked away.
Several other commands will be added into the script's structure, but we can say we reached an established point.

Another facet, anoter achievement. Blast a baddie to listen a rewarding TED noise.
Exactly as we announced, if SID would be for music, TED sound will be used for sound fx. Mike used one channel only, because he needs volume's changes by ADSR envelope. The overall feeling is that the stuff works quite neat!
TED sound and SIDcard output are completely different in volume level. But, you learnt it at this point, Mike's a real pro, and in a very short time, XeO3 can offer you adjustable volume for both the sound outputs: F1/F2 for fx and F3/HELP for music. Quality like raining here!

All this allows me to understand it: time has come in which we need to store almost all the sprites we're going to show in the game. First of all, I must close once forever the system sprites'file: we can have 167 sprites in memory, hence we need to know how many we need for pickups, coins, explosion, main ship, in order to manage the remaining memory at best.
Most of the current pickups and coins had been drawn in the early stages, when I tried to achieve convincing animation with the lowest number of frames. Plasmaball's rotating pickup, for example, is a sprite that should show a rotating object, but 3 frames are sincerely few! That's because I'm gonna redraw upper and lower shot pickups, and plasmaball's too. This is the very first thing to do, before adding some more buddies.
At work!

Hey, look at those turrets! They learnt to shoot against forthcoming ships!

Yeah, Mike spent his time in order to make our project alive but nasty: you can't give back their bullets yet, but now turrets are able to aim at you and shoot their lead.
Now the game begins to show all its hidden difficulty, with dangerous narrow passages and large cleanings that can't defend your ship by the barrage of evil turrets.

Dramatically, XeO3 is mutating from an interesting project to a hard bone to bite!

I did it, finally!
After a period of total lack of ideas, a bike accident, and the breakdown of my pc's power supply, the level 1 is here.

I'm proud of it, because when I had to assemble all the blocks in a level, I learnt a golden rule: the best way to use a character is the most unimaginable one. Yeah, you read right here. When a graphician redefines characters, it's clear he's thinking about a global purpose for them. Well, actually the best result with the same character had been achieved out of this point of view: lighting orb sides had been used as border rocks, in order to set hi-lo borders when needed; pseudovegetal bulbs used in DNA shapes; tube parts used as shadowing.

No more words, click here or the image below to see level 1 and don't miss to tell me what do you think about.

And the engine started again: level one in the making!
Finally, some ideas, and a little change in the graphics'elements.

I used to do this:
- assemble some macrostructures defining basic details, trying to complete the level with most of the 200 available 3x3 blocks;
- place turrets wherever (and whenever) possible, beginning to cut off all the blocks that can be sacrificed;
- insert all the little refinements where possible.

Some guidelines should be followed, especially about preserving a minimum space in the paths'width, or in setting a good size for the big baddie's final chamber.
At the moment, the whole level is 65% ready, and I'm beginning to run away with it due to increasing use. Stay tuned, then.

That's incredible.
Taken apart because of other +4 projects (yeah I know you've understood what I'm talking about), in these days I only wanted to have a complete mapping for level1.

Believe me, I passed so much time staring at the monitor, without ideas forming about.
I was scared, I thought that any choice would be sadly average in quality, and could be done better in a way I wasn't able to imagine. Sometimes, I added some touches here and there, especially due to the latest graphic elements I added. But in those moments, I told myself:"Why do I add these little things? There's no need to do it right now, the very first thought should be: let's draw some big structures, and then let's improve them with all the class touches the saved blocks will allow.".
And no ideas on big structures popped out.

Ok ok, probably it's only a weird moment, it will pass. Let me jump over this period of lacking imagination, I see only few days until we'll get a complete level1.

XeO3 will have 167 sprites per level.
Some of them must be considered fixed system sprites: player's ship, explosion, coins and pickups. Counting their frames, the overall consumption is 41 sprites.
But please, first of all, let me introduce 3 new baddies I drew in the last days.

126 remaining sprites are a good number of them considered per level. Hence, Mike began to code something able to manage a 6 sprites built mid boss. Yes, we will have considerably large big baddies in the middle of the level, and that's nice.
The best thing to do in this case, is to utilize the 6 sprites in the laaaargest displacement possible. Armalyte teaches how to implement this theory: W-shaped ships everywhere! Player's eye will make his brain considering included empty space into the W as part of the enemy's shape.
"Good!" - I thought - "In order to allow Mike developing his piece of code, I'll draw one of those ships!". And actually, I did not, of course. You know I'm essentially brain damaged.

I drew a 6 sprites armoured warrior instead. His helmet is intended to pulse continuously. It should shoot laser with integrated cannon, and when it happens, a gun recoil occurs, and an empty bullet's cartridge pops out to be removed. All the little animations had been finished, though here you can see the warrior in a motionless stage.

And something suggests me that the 2nd level midboss too won't be a W-shaped stuff...