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[saimo]

THE MACHINE ROOMS stage is complete! A major step towards the completion of the whole game has just been made. Plus a few other little improvements.
By the way, I made a final decision: the full game will be free!





CHANGELOG
* Added THE MACHINE ROOMS stage.
* Touched up graphics of the other stages.
* Touched up a couple of arenas.
* Improved walls tiles selection logic.
* Fixed handling of vertical doors shadows.

Demo download: https://www.retream.com/Blastaway

[JobLeonard]

This looks great! Too bad I'm on Linux

[saimo]

This looks great!

Thanks

Too bad I'm on Linux

A few days ago I've tried it under Wine and it worked fine except that keypresses were not detected when entering the name in the hiscores. That's weird, given that the keyboard is otherwise handled correctly (even in the same screen: [ALT]+[F4] works just fine). You might want to give it a try.

[saimo]

Stage-relative checkpoints added! When a new stage is reached, the whole game state gets saved so that it will be possible to resume the game anytime from the same state by means of a menu option.
Side note: I had considered giving the option to resume from any of the stages/arenas reached previously, but that would have made it way too easy to finish the game (and make big scores in the process) with repeated partial sessions, whereas the best way to enjoy the game is to play it from start to finish. Therefore, I went for an alternative that sits in between the two extremes.


(click to enlarge)

CHANGELOG
* Added option to resume from the last stage reached.
* Refined the fix to the handling of shadows.
* Made various other little improvements/fixes.
* Updated/improved/extended manual.

Demo download: https://www.retream.com/Blastaway

[saimo]

1 wor to go! The Exxwor, the wor that appears at THE WAREHOUSE stage, has been added, so now only one wor remains to be done!
Additionally, this build comes with a major bugfix and other nice improvements.





CHANGELOG
* Added (new) Exxwor (the wor specific to THE WAREHOUSE stage).
* Made score restart from 0 when a game is resumed.
* Added 32nd (and last) color.
* Touched up some graphics.
* Changed (again) background of arenas title screen.
* Fixed major bug that made the software-based 5x scaler crash (a whole line of code had disappeared by accident).
* Updated/extended manual.

Demo download: https://www.retream.com/Blastaway

[saimo]

More steps towards perfection (that is, the perfection I'm able to reach).


(click to enlarge)

CHANGELOG
* Made Exxwor shoot.
* Reworked arenas start screen (darkened background, changed heading, added wors list).
* Touched up a few arenas.
* Touched up some Exxwor frames.
* Replaced scrolltext with cycling strings.
* Extended menu navigation controls with:

= select,

= back.
* Updated manual.
* Made various other little changes.

Demo download: https://www.retream.com/Blastaway

[saimo]

All wors are done!





(click to enlarge)

CHANGELOG
* Added Frowor.
* Changed Gjawor sound.
* Added points missing to milestone to HUD.
* Reworked HUD.
* Fixed Gjawor's AI (it could decide to turn when not allowed).
* Fixed/optimized trimming of most shadows.

Demo download: https://www.retream.com/Blastaway

[saimo]

Maintenance release.





CHANGELOG
* Changed slightly darkening of arenas start screen background.
* Fixed (again) Gjawor's AI (it might get stuck due to a missing check).
* Fixed wor spawning delay calculation (it became negative on the last arena).
* Fixed layout of last arena.

Demo download: https://www.retream.com/Blastaway

[saimo]

Another maintenance release. A complete playthrough and a revision of the code revealed a few things to fix/improve.



CHANGELOG
* Made WEAPON bonus less rare.
* Fixed an AI-related bug.
* Fixed milestone when resuming (it was restored instead of being reset, which made sense only when points used to be restored as well).
* Made various other minor changes/optimizations.

Demo download: https://www.retream.com/Blastaway

[saimo]

One of my supporters found the menu item blinking a bit stressful, so I went for an old solution - check this video out:





I'm not 100% sure yet: maybe I'll have to use a darker color for the unselected items.

[a-k-]

I like what you're doing here!

recommended: 800 MHz CPU

[saimo]

I like what you're doing here!

Thanks!

recommended: 800 MHz CPU

Actually, I've been reported that the game runs fine also on less powerful machines. The game, indeed, doesn't require much power, with the biggest bottleneck being the software zooming (now only on Windows machines, as I implemented hardware zooming on AmigaOS machines, given that those are generally slow/outdated).

[JobLeonard]

hardware zooming on AmigaOS machines

Amiga was ahead of its time, wasn't it?

[saimo]

hardware zooming on AmigaOS machines

Amiga was ahead of its time, wasn't it?

Originally, by lightyears. But here I'm talking about the so-called "next-generation" Amigas, i.e. the PC-like machines that appeared in 2003, which have in common with the original Amigas only the OS (AmigaOS). Such machines, apart from the most modern ones, are relatively underpowered (to give you an idea, my AmigaOne has a G4 PPC clocked at 1 GHz, RAM running at 133 MHz, and a Radeon 9000 graphics card with 64 MB of RAM in an AGP slot), so software zooming at 4x and more causes a major slowdown (mostly due to the writes to video memory). Therefore, I made an exception and went for hardware zooming.

[saimo]

Video-related code improved.


(click to enlarge)

CHANGELOG
* Changed rendering of menu items.
* Added 6x zooming.
* Reworked/optimized CRT filters.
* Improved/fixed video initialization.

Demo download: https://www.retream.com/Blastaway

[saimo]

Getting ready for release!
Development is complete (even the installers are done), so now Blastaway only needs to go through the final (and heavy) playtest. Then, if everything turns out to be OK, the game will be released - and for free


(click to enlarge)

CHANGELOG
* Made doors sounds of stages 1 and 4 louder.
* Assigned the menu "back" function also to [DELETE].
* Made some internal optimizations/improvements.
* Fixed bug that caused illegal memory reads at initialization (and might crash the game).
* Fixed/improved/updated manual.
* Written installers.

Demo download: https://www.retream.com/Blastaway

[JobLeonard]

Woo! I have a friend who has a home-built arcade set-up with Amiga built in, already recommended your game to him

[saimo]

Woo! I have a friend who has a home-built arcade set-up with Amiga built in, already recommended your game to him

Very nice of you, thanks!
But I suspect that your friend's Amiga is a classic one (i.e. not an AmigaOS 4 computer), so this game won't work on his arcade machine. If it's an AGA Amiga, I have another game that would be quite enjoyable on that machine though: SkillGrid

[JobLeonard]

Already found it earlier! SHMUPs are his genre

I should ask if he got around to trying it yet and if he can send pics

[saimo]

Already found it earlier! SHMUPs are his genre

Cool!

I should ask if he got around to trying it yet and if he can send pics

Pics would be awesome! Not just of SkillGrid, but of the whole machine