The new graphic artists are not only in place but churning out excellent bitmaps at a high rate. There is now a complete background level with all parallax layers running, and the Jag is handling a full game happening over the top without shredding the OLP - this is a Good Thing. Much more structural stuff has been overlaid on 2K mode - we now have waves that have a beginning and an ending, player ship collision and explosions, enemy shots, and all kinds of good stuff which makes it more of a game and less of a demo of 2K graphic elements.. I'm getting more graphics from the new guys than I know what to do with, never mind where to put in my ROM image.. but that's normal at this stage, don't worry. We should have audio happening in the next few days too. Last couple of days, between the artists and the musicians, Yak has been hosed all over again. I am awash in data and running out of hard disk space.. but there's a Pentium with a bottomless hard disk on the horizon, so it's not gonna stop me.
I've also implemented a couple of bonus/Easter Egg games - working titles 'Pong On Acid' and 'Gridrunner 4 July Mix' - which are kinda fun.. redid all the gameselect/intro screens to my exacting standards of digital pulchritude.. hoping to have the first 5-10 levels more or less running within the next week. Once they're in I should be into tweaking of the gameplay to make it excellent - it's pretty good so far, but acceleration is not quite correctly balanced at the moment. Then, once the gameplay is balanced, it should be a simple case of jamming on new graphics, levels and weapons until I run out of ROM...
More as it happens. Now I have my web page at a better site I hope to be able to update it more frequently..
\ (:-) - Mama do you think they'll like this song... /