Yeah, you'd seen, idle moments for the project: Mike is debugging the inner core of the software sprite system, and is trying to improve the background animation management, apart of some very nice sperimentation about hardware stuff.

On the other hand, the SIDcompo VI closed its doors, and now I can reveal you all about the new music.
I'd taken part of the compo with the XeO3's intro tune, hiding name and purpose to the audience to have a fair play, and it reached the 20th place in 35 tunes overall. That's not bad for a rough tune that is forced to be rough and a bit repetitive to keep into $0D45.

XeO3 has 4K ($1000) available for SID music, containing an intro tune, one dedicated tune per level and two derived jingles (end level and game over). Believe me when I say it's really difficult to compose a decent ingame soundtrack in so little space, but, after a desperate fight against memory issues and cutting here and there instruments and sectors, I got success in inoculating the original tunes into this new one. Yeah, they had to be reduced a bit, but I'm quite satisfied of all the new clean sounds I obtained.

You can listen to the new tunes clicking on the blog.radio icon in the column on the right. Hope you wanna comment them here

I love this feature! I love it so much, I wanna be the Mike's blog echo and publish the image here too!

Mike is hitting the code again with a target to reach: find spare memory for the second time. In the meantime, he's trying and trying several little solutions here and there. One of those, will cost about 200 bytes and a bit of speed, but that's so cool and useful!
When you hit an enemy, it flashes. Apart of the big improve in player's satisfaction, it looks pretty nice, and allows us in the usage of weak point for larger enemies: the player will know about a possible damage to the enemy when he'll shoot at the weak point, hence a whole slice of changes has been added to the big bosses'build up.
Apropos, I may picture how to roughly draw a big boss for level 1, but at the moment we're deciding how they're done: yes, initially we said:"Chars!", after some time we said "Sprites!", and now...well, we will see.

Ah I wanna tell ya, music has been composed! I can't pillory it yet for several reasons you will know soon, but I could start describing it.
The game will load one music file per level. Mike is deeply persuaded about the needing of let the player starts to play immediately, once the game is loaded. This means, in the available 4 Kbytes for it, I have to squeeze both frontend and level music, without too much loose in quality for both.
Once said, then done. I squeezed in a decent main tune, two jingles for end level and game over (obtained from the main theme itself), and the 1st level tune. The latter is the older 1st level tune you can hear in the radio, converted to the new instruments'set.
Believe me, I had to fight a lot against lack of memory, I had to reduce some instruments'quality and to cut the tune's length. But in the end: success! Soon, you'll listen at all the 4 tunes.

Heeey, some days ago Mike has written a post on some far c64 forum about his almost average skill about shoot'em'ups. But no, you cheated, I saw you gettin'coins in a row!
Allow me to introduce you our brave space warrior Mike, fighting in the Galaxy of Current Work in Progress.

Not bad the dude, uh?
Yeah, don't care the older sprite version you'd seen inside, like the ancient 3 frame animated meatballs. You just spotted one of the two most garish features we added: a 95% complete frontend. The remaining 5% is for options and a certain margin of uncertainty about my XeO3 logo (do you like it, though the limited memory Mike allowed me to use?). Yeah, because when Mike popped up with the starfield (greytone at that early time), we virtually calculated no memory left to spend for anything else. Though this, he didn't limited me so much eventually. And, don't ask me because of which miracle, he managed to keep the logo without cutting it. Guys, hope you're close to value the effort!

Well I expect now you to tell me which is the second bbbbbbbigger feature. The bu...the bulll...oh, no spanish folklore here, be serious. The bullets, yeah!
Yes, Mike used the same technique he implemented for the turrets'bullets too, and now the coarse and lame black box that usually surrounds character based shots is gone forever, allowing a professional bullet's gfx overlapping on the whole background. And, useless to say, I love it!

Bad news for my musician's side: having an unexpectedly cool frontend, now we really need a frontend music. Needing a frontend music would mean I have to cut tunes of minor importance in order to make space for the former. Cutting tunes would mean a global rearranging of the whole instruments'pack in the music file that will take me to...omg I have to rewrite all the music! Panic!
No panic at all, I'll try to keep the music theme, at least. But I'm almost sure that some of my prefer features (the Pan's flute in the 2nd level's ingame tune, for example), can be considered gone forever. But I don't wanna give up on the jingles front, saving a bit of both game over and end level jingle, in a brand new shorter composition.
I'm sharpening my blades, yyaarrrrr!

It was so clear that the pod I'd drawn few days ago were lacking shadowing/lightning effects on the core ball, our mate Chicken too has pointed out this in the comments. He commented when I was just at work in order to drop some shadows on that milled sphere I loved so much, and of which I was so proud.

Once animated (and it was cool!), I'd shown it to Mike, and Mike told me it's odd, especially in that "milling"; he suggested me to draw a simpler shape.
Ok ok, glass or metal? Ah, you said it's up to me? Ok glass then. I'd drawn a nice pod with a central glass ball, and I was very proud of it too. Once Mike saw it, he told me there still was so much black, and black is the devil, and the devil uses to subvert our project's karma, and that's bad; he then suggested me to draw a simple ball.

Ok ok, metal, metal then, solid metal. Hence, I'd drawn a wonderful core of metallic sphere, that works so good in the glorious PAL video blurring, especially the light pixel in the bottom because it's surrounded by darker ones, and the overall effect is perfect. Mike saw it, then he sent back a .png image (one of those humiliations that can kill a graphician's heart in a finger's snap) that would show me his idea: a simple ball. A ball, done like a ball, a ball, a ball, actually a ball , a ball for true.

Ok...ok... I did two versions of the...the very simple shape: one with shadows, and one with no light effects, and this time, Mike told me he may be pleased by the former, but he also told me it has to be up to me, in order to choose a definitive one.
And when I was almost mentally prepared to hardly freeze in my position, he said "Oops now I see them on the real PAL video machine, yeah both glass and metal are cool.".

The question is: would he probably love the very first one with the milling, if he used to see it on the real iron, from the beginning?
Nobody will know. And I wanna die today.
But first, lemme put all the music into my blog.radio.

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!

What about the menhirs'dilemma, did you asked?
Well, Mike was right. Non collidable backdrops are some very cool stuff, unfortunately your +4 literally pukes a 21 chars deep scrolling with 7 software sprites, while music and all the gameplay's rest simultaneously do their jobs. Moreover, we can't spend cpu time masking sprites, and this means: a sprite, while spending time over a non collidable background, becomes a chameleon, merging its margin's colors with the background itself.
At this point, it would better use the last free slice of the charset in 2x2 turrets, little animations and backdrops again.

I said music, so let me spend some further words about this subject.
The main audio output, on which the music is based, is Solder's SIDcard (or Csory's compatible), hence conceived for newSID 8580. Though considered a standard among the sceners, I personally bought the last one years ago (phew!), then this brilliant hardware gem soon became a chimera. Surprisingly, in these days some rumors made us hope for the best to come in the next future, in order to have a new SIDcard source to feed the scene.
If no SIDcard available, then the good old TED: I suggested to Mike about using the great Mconv 1.6 by TLC/CNS, fast, smart and incredibly small ($0400!). The SID sound will be squeezed into TED voices, in a democratic way to play.

As you know, I decided to trash the jingles and tunes I just composed for levels one and two, cause so much time passed. I'll compose fresh ones, but you can click on the blogradio 2.0 icon here, in the right column, in order to listen to both of them.

Time to make some decisive selection: at this moment, which parts will be used for sure?

Ok, first of all, the 2x2 sprites I did are all good, no probs with them. I only have to draw many others of them. Since the first time I tried to draw a 2x2 sprite, it was clear that it would be the easiest thing to do: 8x16 MC stuff must fight against your imagination, to be a good one. Though this, I was very happy of the player's ship sprite, it's curvy, morbid and hard shell looking. I'm also satisfied by the explosion 8 frames animation, that reminds me Macross'explosion I saw in my youthness on tv.
You can recognize: player's ship, pickup 1 (it will be smartbomb or shield recover), three weapons'pickups, up down and read shot pickups, coin and big coin, explosion, and my very first baddie wonderfully 5 frames animated.

Due to some changes both in the gameplay and in memory allocation, Mike gave to me $0300 for the ingame panel. That's mean 60 chars for a 40x4 chars panel.
The panel's graphics changed as you can see below.

And the music?
All the tunes and effects must be composed again. I liked so much all the previous tunes, jingles and effects I composed for the first two levels, but too much time passed, and I wanna raise the technical standards a bit higher.
In the blog column on the right, you can find a blogradio link. Click on it and a little music player will pop out. At the moment, I put into it the old tunes I composed for levels 1 and 2; in the near future, I'll use the blogradio in order to allow you to listen at my music attempts, following the project's evolution in the audio field too.