I spent a little bit of time today grabbing various pieces of "inspiration" for the game; first came the arduous job of tracking down a copy of Paradroid 90. Now, Citadel has always owed a small debt to Paradroid, but in my mind the games were always poles apart in terms of gameplay (Citadel being more strategic in nature). However, the more ideas I think of to update the game, the closer it edges towards Paradroid. Hmmm. The last thing I want to do is a Paradroid clone, hence hunting down a copy of the game to see how Braybrook updated his baby for the Amiga.
After a couple of hours slaving over a hot emulator, I came away most disappointed; Paradroid 90 is a nice game, don't get me wrong, but the vertical scrolling really changes (and restricts) the gameplay, and some of the background obstacles are annoyingly obtrusive. It did spawn a couple of ideas, however, regarding the hierarchy of the robots and the communication structure they would use (I worked on a PS2 game a couple of years ago, and had an extremely tight set of security droids which communicated in a very specific way - the player had to work around this, but could also use it to his/her advantage by luring robots to other parts of the level).
I rounded off the night with a coding session; up until now, I'd merely been fiddling about with other people's programs, but considered it about time I went back to the start and ploughed through the Getting Started and Tutorial sections. Five hours later, I'd been through everything and had started work on a test-bed for the title screen (complete with Citadel logo and a scrolling backdrop of Monitor craft!).
