Something To Show - PROGRESS!

Progress is being made at a good pace, although stuff to show is pretty minimal. I have the map tile system in place and working, as well as the starfield (that I had to slow down 1 pixel so it travelled slower than the foreground).

I threw up some unfinished graphics as a dummy for where the scoreboard will be (although I might make it smaller - a fuel gauge will be at the bottom).

The initial graphics tiles will be in the old scramble style from the arcade - an homage. I can change them later or expand on them if I want.
After getting the map system working, I've discovered that making maps block by block is a huge pain in the ass.... it will take FOREVER, and its time I'd rather spend coding the rest of the actual game mechanics. I've decided to write a map editor to speed the process up.. nothing fancy, just enough to get the job done. The tile map being done in bytes, so that gives me 255 tiles to play with - I'm going to cut this down to around 200 actual tiles and 55 bytes for 'special instructions' - $ff being 'swap to a new map' and some of the others will be to initialize enemies - so all I need at the moment is something quick to edit basic 16 pixel blocks into a map.

Doing it in assembly is certainly possible, but a waste of time. I'd rather work on the routines I *NEED* in assembly, rather than dealing with things that right now I don't need - I've decided to do the editor in AMOS... back in the day I played around with it, and after loading it up for the first time in nearly 12 years, I have a all new loathing of its interface.

The Amiga had its quirky features already, and getting re-used to workbench (even 3.1, when my old ami had 2.0) and even the minimal quirks of Devpac 3's editor have been a chore.. AMOS has its own new set of quirks to learn... on the upside it has and does all the things I need for a quick and dirty map editor without having to delve back into system libraries and the quirks of C on the amiga:

Load an iff
copy blocks of it from one screen to another
mouse and keyboard input
file requestors
save/load data to disk...

Next time I might muck around in Amiga E, but for now AMOS is the right tool for the job.