Well, as it turned out, I didn’t get anywhere near 48 hours; more like 8… Even so, I now have a slightly updated retro sound fx engine (PC speaker emulator, originally), and the OpenGL based graphics engine can load and render tiles, maps and sprites. Not quite what I intended (a playable game), but still OK considering that I’m messing with old C code and only got a fraction of the time I planned for.
I’ll probably spend a few more hours on it now, getting the game logic in too, before I go back to working on Kobo II.
Still not quite sure where to go with Project Spitfire from then on. Stick with the 320×240 256 color retro style graphics, or upgrade to current standards? Or maybe make it even more retro…? Or something completely different, way out there? Keep the fast scrolling (60 pixels/second in the original 320×232), or step down to a more traditional scrolling speed? (This has massive impact on level design and attack waves, obviously – which is why I’m leaning towards the fast scrolling, rather than doing what “everybody else” has been doing for a few decades now.) More of the current 8-bit era fixed attack waves, or add smarter enemies?
Well, a few more hours, and I can start to actually try things out and see where I want to take it – which was the whole point of picking this up in the first place! So, although Real Life(TM) got in the way again, making the deadline impossible to meet, I still got another project off the ground, and in the process, I cleaned up some old code that might show up in other projects later. For example, the graphics engine uses some code from Kobo Deluxe and the OpenGL binding from Kobo II, and might replace the messy code (and glSDL) in Kobo Deluxe later on.
Thanks for the motivation and inspiration!
David
