The last bit of 6502 has been written. It's all there, game ending and all. I haven't even spotted any bugs! Now I just have to finish off designing the levels. And if I have a few bytes left over at the end, I'll try and do something fancy with them!

Watch this space!

Am I alone in wondering what happened to (the release of) this fantastic game?

No! Many of us at the Acorn Hackfest on 16/17 Aug 2014 were marvelling at the game while lamenting that it has not yet been released

We live in hope

Was the engine going to be released too?

Great minds think alike, I also asked about it 12/2/14

I can't find the original response from my email but something on the lines of a new job, so concentrating on that.

Need to play this!!!

Same here, still hopeful this game will finally get released, it looks and sounds brilliant.

It was playable across the whole weekend at Play Expo in Manchester, though admittedly it was still the "Replay" version that was produced in November 2011.

Cheers for the interest guys, I've actually been back on it again over the last few weeks (determined to get it finished somehow!) but honestly have so little time these days for any personal projects - "real" work just saps my energy and leaves me without the impetus to go back to fun Beeb stuff, or indeed any of the other little projects I've had on the boil!

Literally the only thing left is level design, although I did add some new bonus collectables the other day. Ever the perfectionist, I'm never quite happy with it...

Weird mice in cars no more:

Looks really great Rich, any chance of another 60fps video if you don't have a new demo? - only if it won't distract you too much

Blurp only updates every 3 frames - not that it looks especially bad for it. There's enough going on at any one moment to detract from the frame rate, which was always my intention (favour sprite number over frame rate!). To be honest, an 8-way scrolling game in Mode 5 would be far too fast if it ran at 50fps!

What does look lovely at 50fps is the little Mode 2 demo I put together yonks ago that does line-by-line vertical scrolling and uses graphics culled from Blurp. But that's still waiting for a game to be written around it!

That must have been what I was thinking of, it did look great, and I'm sure you have made the right choice with Blurp. I get quite fixated on 50Hz sometimes, although Gil and I made Jeltron at 25hz for the same reason

With Jeltron it works even better at 25Hz as you're already doing pixel-by-pixel movement if I remember right - can't get any smoother than that! So updating every other frame just gets the game speed right...

The reason I originally abandoned my 50Hz demo was because I found I didn't have enough frame time to write the game I wanted to write - it was a huge limitation, and I decided I'd rather be less ambitious with frame rate and instead use the time to render loads of sprites, dots, etc, and write a good game with it. I'm sure there's some design which would lend itself to the original engine, but it'd need to have far fewer sprites on-screen. Incidentally, even that goes a little bit too fast for comfort when moving horizontally - 25Hz results in a better game speed (but leads to all the horrible double imaging artefacts that you get from 25Hz update).

I agree, one day I will add some more to the Rally-X demo I posted, but it is only acceptable if you use an emulator that supports the h-sync with "feature" or a CRT on a real BBC.

I was interested in trying a port of Edge Grinder as a little diversion a while back - that uses the CRTC R3 trick on the Amstrad CPC to get that lovely scrolling. But after figuring that it'd almost certainly have to be Master only (because of the sheer amount of graphics), I reckoned it was probably just better to use shadow RAM for the 1 pixel offset buffer, and get some double buffering while I was about it. But then it didn't seem like such a tough challenge, and I lost interest

I don't really think the R3 hack is particularly practical unfortunately. And it can lead to weird display sync issues if you try to change it in the middle of a frame too. Edge Grinder does that, but that's why there's a 2 character row blank area between the scrolling window and the status - to give the VDU some time to resync. You can't rely on the shift to be exactly half a character either - at worst, if you try to swap between a one pixel offset version of the status display on alternate frames using vertical rupture, you can get a horrible subtle vibrating effect where the two frames don't quite match.

For horizontal scrolling, I figured you need big enough character sprites that a 2 pixel scroll doesn't seem so 'fast', or else you need to go down to 25Hz. It honestly doesn't look that bad as long as it's rock solid and you have enough going on to distract you from the scrolling judder. I tend to find that just focusing your eyes on the main character alone is normally enough to detract from the frame rate.