r0x zer0 - Opening a can of worms can be a good thing...

I've known for ages that the Atari coder I'm working with (Tomchi) is dead against development blogs (they are not approved of by the demoscene) - so when he found out about this blog and my previous posts he wasn't exactly overjoyed that I'd leaked a couple of images.  However, it had the desired effect - we spent most of the evening chatting about the game and he sent me the latest build to test. ;)

To my complete shock, r0x zer0 is already a fully playable game.  An unbalanced game lacking proper design and impossible to beat (my fault for making some wild guesses in the design document), but a playable game nonetheless.  In fact, it plays all the way from the functional main menu, through the intro and game then back again.  There's even a cool highscore table (almost working) as well.  Progress is slow but steady.
 
Without giving too much away at this stage, r0x zer0 is a high octane new-school shooter for the old-school Atari STE, featuring procedural wave generation, arcade quality strategic-shooter game-play, amazing pixel art from Vierbit, chip grooves from (TBC) Stu, DMA-SC, Tomchi and 505, as well as a load of other clever stuff that hasn't been seen in an Atari ST/STE shoot 'em up before.  Almost two years in the making (so far), r0x zer0 will finally bring some much-needed next-level shit to the 16-bit machine!
 
The main work to be done now involves creating wave patterns to be selected by the game engine during play; a slow, tedious yet ultimately rewarding task.  Finding free time in which to do this isn't easy, but as my main PC is down and my media box is out of order, my options at home are few - so hopefully more progress will be made over the next few months.  Meanwhile, Tomchi plans to continue adding features, fixing my design flaws and generally making GFA do things it shouldn't be able to.