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Aaron and I had a very important business meeting this weekend at our head office (cough) The Coach and Horses. Among the things we discussed were throwing ideas about on a potential next project after Paradroid, and debating wether we need to have gamepad support in Paradroid. As I’ve mostly just used keys/mouse on the games I play on the Mac, and just stick to playing most big games on the PS4, I hadn’t given it much thought until now.

More work on the transfer game this afternoon.

Creating the transfer game was always going to be a major task in Paradroid due to the complexities of having a random element to every game screen generated but having to make every one actually playable.

While Aaron and I were looking into wether we could actually do our own clone of Paradroid, I also went looking for some alternative music as I didn’t fancy the idea of using the droid chatter system of the original game.

Even though the title sequence still needs some work to get it up to standard, we decided that it was something to come back to later as there will soon be enemy droids going into the game. Obviously, without having the transfer game in place, it’s going to be just the shoot-em-up aspect of Paradroid we’ll be testing and fixing, so it’s time to get that done now so all aspects of enemy droids can be set up in one go.

Started ripping out the temporary text lines I’ve been using for testing the scrolling information. Had all sorts of fun and games creating a routine to load in a text file and then display the text using a DS_list. Because I’d been editing it on the virtual PC  it had inherited all sorts of stupid formatting codes that weren’t visible and caused the formatting to go all over the place. Eventually got that all sorted out and finally had reasonably formatted instructions doing what I wanted.

Busy doing other things today so, rather than attempting to write code in a short amount of time, I went through what I actually had to comment it all up so it’s readable by Aaron as well as myself. I have to remember sometimes that I’m working collaboratively now and this stuff has to be done for both our convenience.

Today was a day of pretty heavy research looking into the most effective way to do the scrolling system on the title screen. As mentioned previously, I’ve tried a few different ways with varying success but the general rule appears to be to use a surface to get it done properly. This did turn out to be true.

Hands up all of you lot that remember the original Paradroid? Quite a few, I suspect, so you’d be the people remember the attention to detail that showed up in the title screen with the scrolling screens of text, use of colour, and even formatting of the scroll text, within the limits of the font size Andy was working with. It’s down to me to realistically improve on this while staying as close as practical in feel to the original.

Development is going pretty well on Paradroid at present so, pretty soon, I’m going to be posting up some work in progress of both development images, and the game as it is at present, running.