Plan for Alex Parker

I think I've been playing this more than I should be, what turned out to be a simple project is turning out to be too fun for its own good. Despite the time-wasting, er, I mean playtesting, I've managed to replace the placeholder graphics with some nicer ones, they're nicked off the net but the should suffice for the time being. I've added particle systems, sound effects, background music and a scrolling starfield, and after all that playtesting I've tweeked the acceleration / number of asteroids / number of powerups to what I think is a good balance.

I need to work out how to impliment T2D's gui system so I can wrap the game up in a nice menu. I also need to work out how to go about displaying high-scores, ideally I'd like to be able to connect to a server so that people can view their internet rankings alongside their home rankings. I can see this little game polishing up quite nicely, once I've worked out the intricacies of the engine.

Anway, heres some screenshots to show some of the progress:

The ship explodes into little pieces that fly into the screen:

The powerups have a nice sparkley-burst effect when you collect them:

When you respawn, you are invulnerable for a few seconds, indicated by the sparkly blue shield at the front of the ship:

My choice of background music is a selection of tracks from Andy-C's Nightlife 2 album, it goes quite well with the furious pace of the game, its just a shame I won't be able to include it in the release, when I finally get it to that stage.

Anyway, my current plan is to get some sleep before work :)