So, here's the first screenshot of my new 5200 project, Magical Fairy Force.

Not a whole lot to see here, but there's some important stuff.

First, we have one yet to be revealed character. She'll get her proper coming out party when the game is further along, but for now you get this teaser image.

Note that the character graphics are done by me at this point, and I'm no artist. I plan to eventually hook up with an artist that I've worked with before to get some much better sprite work done.

The two players are made up of all four player objects to give them lots of color. One of the players is not visible in this screenshot, and that's the one I'm using for the cute fairy wings. The wings are drawn every other frame, which provides a really nice transparency effect. This screenshot happened to catch one of the frames without the wings.

Something else you can't see is that I have successfully implemented trak-ball support. I still need to do a lot of tweaking of the values, but the work of detecting the presence of the trak-ball and interpreting its values has been completed. The game supports a trak-ball for each player, so if you own two of those bad boys you're in for a treat.

The next thing I want to get working is shooting. This part is only going to be as complicated as I make it, so I need to experiment with a few things.