It just gets fancier and fancier! Those pop-up menus are really nice, though in my opinion the full screen text ("SHUTTLE LANDING BAY TWO", etc) still doesn't seem to quite fit in with the rest. Everything else is so pretty.

I love how it's progressing, the vents and crushers look great.

It just gets fancier and fancier! Those pop-up menus are really nice, though in my opinion the full screen text ("SHUTTLE LANDING BAY TWO", etc) still doesn't seem to quite fit in with the rest. Everything else is so pretty.

Yeah I do agree - I've been thinking about this for sometime but yet to come up with a solution that I'm happy with that doesn't restrict how much screen room I have available for the mission text. I'll work something out eventually though. Actually I do have a perfect solution but it means re-writing a bunch of stuff that I'm not prepared for (yet..  )

Ooh I like the tips idea. Just make sure to not overdo them like in Hyrule Warriors, though. I hate when I start playing a game and every two step I make there is a pop up appearing that says. Tips should only appear when necessary (eg when you get near a door or something).

True. There are only 8 tips, although they all do appear relatively early in the first level of the game (and they only appear the one time each unless they're reset from the main menu). Having said that, I might be able to condense/remove 1 or 2 of them.. Or as Art_of_camelot has suggested below...

This looks really nice James. Also, is there a option to turn hints off if the player doesn't want them?

There currently isn't, but this is a good idea and I have enough room on the options screen to add this, so I think I'll do so. Thanks!

I was brainstorming a bit today over lunch (as you do) on the 2 player co-op feature that I was hoping to include in v2.x. Seeing as the I/O port linkplay method has been encountering so many issues, I had a realisation that I should just make the 2 player co-op playable on one calculator, which will be much less complicated to implement, and will run much faster than the linkplay version.

Why I failed to think of this months ago, one can only wonder Especially given that the original Team 17 games were 2 player on one computer, as opposed to network games.

Anyhow once I get some more level design finished (5 level layouts are done now), I'll put my coding hat back on and try to implement this

I wonder how difficult it would be to just use another calculator as a second controller, not updating the screen, just sending across key presses and doing all the other calculations on the host calculator? I've never done anything with the linkport so i'm not sure what sorts of problems you might have. Either way, multiplayer co-op play on one calc sounds great, too, though i've got to admit i'll probably only ever be able to use the single player mode

That's an interesting suggestion. I think at this stage I'll be running with the single calc co-op option, but I'll keep that in mind to experiment if there are any future versions..

Whilst it's taking a while, the level designing is progressing - I'm about halfway there now

I've also been doing some coding of a new feature which wasn't on my original "to-do" list, but was just an idea I had recently. The game now has a short "cut scene" intro-type thing at the start, and each episode will also have their own ones as well. On top of this, the "epilogue" shown when you finish an episode will be ever so slightly more flashy that the plain v1.x version.

We're now into 2015 so the deadline's getting closer! The cutscenes sound like a nice touch, too.

The pressure is on!

Way back when I released v1.0, I had a request to improve the look of the mission text screen. Today I finally bit the bullet and made a minor improvement to it, simply by adding a thin wireframe border. It's not much as I need to keep as much LCD space free for the text, but I think it does the trick (less it more?).




EDIT: Today I went through and added it to the Intex Terminal / Radar Scanner screens too.