Saturday's my "At work for a while" day, so I usually get a lot less codey time done, but I still managed quite a few bits and pieces in the morning.
A couple of new baddies, and a teensy bit of AI are in there, as is something which may or may not be confusing, depending on whether you remember the 7 year old oddity or not.
Suffice to say, the bananas do definitely appear to be coming from below the arrow.
.. not sure what that's all about..

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Feedback

Got a little feedback, yesterday, which is nice.

A couple of days ago, @deps81 helped me out when I asked about Lion vs Leopard compatibility.
I was worried that a Leopard compile might not work on Lion, but if I upgraded, then my new Lion might not compile for Leopard! eeek!
I asked on twitter, Deps tested, and he says my games run fine on Lion.
So, if anything breaks from this point on, we can all blame him

-=-=-

Deps's Feedback.

Awesome game! Insanely hard! Good work!
The difficulty is a bit uneven. Sometimes I fly through the levels, sometimes I cant take one step before getting killed.

This is nice to know!... (given the way the gameplay works!)

Kinda!

Having gotten most of the elements of gameplay into the engine, I've been spending most of this week tidying up most of the "Really Random" elements, and trying to make things progressively more difficult as the player goes on.
It's still fairly random, and things aren't always perfect, but most of the time things will work quite a bit better than before.

Quite a few times I found myself in one of thoise positions where I cannot continue unless I commit suicide.
And these are those "Takes an age to fix" problems..
I tend to stumble upon them, think "oh, a quick fix there!" then quick fix it, and then can't find the issue again...
I'm assuming I'm fixing them, but you can't really tell until you find one again!
I have managed to fix some of them, though.
Little extra bits of floors, removal of blocks, springs being better aligned, things like that.
Suffice to say, the level generator is now over 600 lines of code on it's own, and that's without the bit where it needs to select which baddies to use!!

Some boss battles are a bit hard because all the weapons spawn up there, and I can't reach them.
This, too, is actually part of the level generation, and/or user fail. .. and or that damn dragon..
1. The boss bits need ladders nearby, to help a little.
2. The user needs to remember that they can fall through the floor to re-appear up top. Not sure how to point that out, but it definitely needs doing 'cos I even forget myself, sometimes!
3. I think the dragon's weapon needs to occasionally blow up a floor! I got stuck at the top, with no holes, for AGES! Damn random levels!!

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Given that most of these issues are "random" based, and the fact that I've actually been seeing these little oddities all week, and attempting little fixes, is probably a good sign that the game's going well.

Tomorrow, perhaps, I'd like to tackle my plan of an AI "pre-play" tester.
I've not gotten around to this, yet, but the basic gist would be a really fast AI test, which would run through the level, hunt of blockages, and flag up possible issues.
My main concern is that this might actually end up chugging along at quite a slow rate, so I've been slightly worried about adding it.

Still, give it a go, eh!?

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Screeny!

Today's screenshot was created to show that, although all my screenshots so far have been nice and big, the game still runs in stupidly tiny resolutions, too.


I'll be honest, it looks a bit.. um... smushed!
Do the game a favour, and play it nice and big!

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Release Date

I've been aiming for 13th November for this release, and as we all know, it started off as a "Mash together NeonPlat and SuperMarioLand" type game.

Based on the fact that 13th November is a SUNDAY, I'd been assuming that my game would safely release on a day that no other game will.
I mean, who releases proper commercial games on Sundays?! That's stupid!

I also assumed, based on the fact that the UK release of SuperMario3DLand isn't until the week after, that it'd be a nice warm up game, before the actual Nintendo thing.

Apparently I'm wrong.

Apparently, the US release date is, inexplicably, on a Sunday.
...!
And guess which bloody Sunday they've picked!!
*sigh*

3 weeks and counting!
o/ woot o/