I guess its time for a small update on this game. Its been a long time coming (too long in fact ) but the game is now at Release Candidate #1 status (RC#1). The final game now features :-

• Never before seen graphics from nonner242
• Five awesome tunes from Mystery Musician
• Three difficulty levels: Easy, Medium and Hard
• Eight enemy types to avoid/shoot
• Four different enemy attack styles
• Four "Evil Otto style" invincible bosses and their shots
• Five rocket ships to build up and collect fuel pods for
• Animated rocket launch/land sequence
• Eight different collectable items
• Procedurally generated planet names, graphics and colour schemes
• An animated "New Game" intro sequence
• An animated "New Planet" intermission
• Four "New Ship" animated intermissions
• HSC league and player initials entry (saved/restored to/from cart)
• Fully adjustable volume for both music and special effects (settings saved/restored to/from cart)
• A selection of graphical screens and animated screen wipes done in Coloured Squares mode
• All tunes are PAL and NTSC compatible.
• Piggy Bank also makes an appearance too
  

Take a look at the sneak peek video of RC#1 here :-

Difficulty levels
There are three difficulty levels in the game that are selected by pressing 1, 2, or 3 during the game's attract sequence:

• Easy - The next rocket part to collect is identified briefly (it flashes blue)
• Medium - No rocket part identification and an "Evil Otto style" boss
• Hard - No rocket part identification, an "Evil Otto style" boss and weapon overheating
  

A new life is awarded every 10K points too. I'm not a great believer in giving the player a bunch of things to tweak because all those parameters should have be worked out in the balancing phase of the game development in my opinion.

Procedurally generated planets
The procedurally generated planet's names, graphics and their colours allows for far more level variety in the game than I could come up with manually e.g.
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Yep! The game generates ice/snow planets just for Rev .

Bosses
These are screenshots of two of the four bosses (the video contains a snippet of the first boss in action):


"New Ship" intermissions
There are four "New Ship" intermissions in the final game (only two are shown in the video above). Each intermission contains some random elements so that you won't always see the exact same thing every time you play. The intermissions are chosen randomly too, just to mix it up a bit.

Options
I noticed that the game's Options screen wasn't using the right font after I posted the video. Its corrected in this screen shot :-

Its been quite a while since I coded that screen and the 'S' and 'Z' font characters were changed a long time afterwards.

Bee3s
I have plenty of blank Bee3 PCBs to populate :-


Shells
I have several crates of these things to clean and prepare :-

If I run out of them, I know a man with far more (*cough* BBWW *cough*)

Wrapping up
The plan going forward is as follows :-
- Get some more Bee3s built up and programmed for the final phase of testing.
- Beta testers to test the game on real hardware for a couple of months and for any bugs found to be subsequently fixed and their carts swapped out.
- Ship JasonlikesINTV his early copy (as I promised ages ago).
- Ship it out!
- Make the game available to anybody who missed out.

Testing
I have tested the game on several of my own NTSC Inty II and PAL units and it behaves as expected. Having said that, there is no substitute for testing "out there" on different hardware.

 

As always, if anybody wants a refund just drop me a PM.