First of all, I should make it clear that an elderly close relative of mine is in the final stages of cancer, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to spend on this. Also, I’ve been working on Kobo II (a new sound engine, actually) rather than thinking about the MiniLD, and I pretty much decided what to work on while writing this.

First, I was thinking I’d “just” add sound and a level editor to Fixed Rate Pig, which may seem closer to a finished game at first sight – but thinking more carefully about it, it feels like Project Spitfire is practically as close, and more deserving of an update, as it’s practically dead in it’s current state: a windowed mode Win16 hack of a port with no sound.

Thing is, most of the engine code has actually been ported already; the core of the Kobo Deluxe sprite engine is actually a port of the one from Project Spitfire, and the “speaker” sound hack plays the original sounds from the DOS version. I’ll probably use OpenGL for smooth scrolling (it’s a pretty fast scroller, so it’ll look horrible at low frame rates…), and I might rip the map editor from my “smoothscroll” SDL example. Massive code reuse, that is! Hopefully…

Not expecting to do any significant work on the actual game or anything during the weekend; just bringing it back to life, so I can play around with it and see if I get inspired or something. If nothing else, it could make another programming example for people to play around with – and perhaps a way for me to show that I can occasionally write a few lines of working C code. 😉

Incredibly old site with info, screenshots and Win16 download can be found here:
http://olofson.net/spitfire/

Wow… Just realized the original DOS version is 15 years old now. Maybe it’s time to, like, finish it one of these years…? 😀