A mere 9 months since I last touched my Citadel code, I'm once again knee-deep in variables and functions in an attempt to bring my remake to life (for the uninitiated, the previous blog can be found here).
Citadel has been in the pipeline since August 2004, almost 4 years, give or take downtime for school, personal upheaval, and the creation of my FishEd map editor. However, I'm pretty much running out of excuses so maybe now is the time to knuckle-down and "git 'er done."
Incidentally, this Blog has been created purely for convenience's sake; at the end of every month I'll be transplanting this blog to the Scary Fish website for the benefit of those who prefer the original blog.
I kicked off by posting a small video of the game on YouTube; unfortunately, I got the date wrong, resulting in much confusion at the Retro Remakes Forum over whether the game was an April Fool joke. That'll teach me to use my digital camera to take game footage...
The early testbed shown in the video had several huge problems, particularly with regards to collision detection and the movement routines. Additionally, the scrolling system wasn't quite as flexible as I needed (the ideas behind my version will take the game way beyond the realms of just a simple remake). And thus, the only way forward was to completely start again from scratch.
My first task was to separate the "camera" from the player, so that the two could operate independently; this would allow me, for instance, to have roving cameras, picture-in-picture modes, and also be able to zoom out for a bird's eye view of the level in order to debug the AI more effectively.
I spent a day just working on the camera, adding in mouse control for complete flexibility. Then I added in the player controls, allowing the ship to be moved around the level regardless of where the camera was. Next, I decided to pop the game into a GUI framework, ultimately paving the way for a really nice little game editor which would work in real-time.
The next big task was to add a scale/zoom function to the game; I've always loved 2D, especially when zooming and scaling is applied (just look at what Sega achieved with Outrun, Thunderblade, Space Harrier, et al.), and I particularly liked the 2D engine the Rowlands Brothers used in their Blood Lust beat 'em up.
Surprisingly, the scaling took precious little time to implement, but certain zoom levels began to throw up pretty severe problems with my graphics card (and with all crashes, it's difficult to work out if it's the software or the hardware, or a little of both).
