When I first heard 'The Intro and the Outro' many years ago, I assumed all the names were made up! I mean, Roger Ruskin Spear, really..?

I'm thinking of doing a "Life of Repton" style cartoon cover - based on the original Beano - if that's alright with you.

Some similar names to consider ... ?

Glob, Blurp, Voop, and Zopp (via Coop)

Sam.

I've roughed out how I envisage the comic should look - obviously I'll draw all the characters properly.

Wow, that's inspired Dave! Great concept (and nice mockup!) - I reckon it'd work nicely. Soon I'm going to be adding new monsters, to shift the emphasis a little from these few types that are already implemented.

By the way, would you be ok to do a nice looking loading screen too? Something colourful in Mode 2; I can't imagine the comic strip idea translating well to a Beeb loading screen though, so it might need something a little less 'busy'. I intend to change the in-game colours in each level, to get away from a permanently red, blue and yellow world, so the more colourful, the better!

Regarding the title - I just thought of Pest Control or The Madhouse... maybe something along those lines..? I'm certainly happy to try to characterise the 'hero' too, much like Orlando did with Frak!, or of course, Repton. He already has quite a lot of character I think, and that fits with the comic strip idea too. Then we can even have as a subtitle "Introducing Blurp (or whatever his name is) in...", then the game title.

Ideas, ideas...

Done a bit more on this. The graphics are very simple (they'd have to be - I'm doing them) but it will be quite small on the cover. Look better on posters at shows, etc.

Inkscape has more bugs in it at the moment than an entomologist's wet dream, which is slowing things up. The node tool, rulers and pattern fills and pdf export are all broken!

This is cool Dave - you've captured the 'look' of all the protagonists perfectly - well, improved them all really It's a great idea, and a nicely-written comic strip too!

I'm gonna write some .NET WinForms apps in the next few days (this is the sophisticated side of Beeb development!) - one so I can easily design new sprites (both scenery and monsters), and another so I can actually create maps. I figure in the long run this will be more productive (and I already more or less have a sprite editor written; just need to adapt it to the needs of Onslaught)! If you fancied having a go at 'tarting up' the graphics at some stage closer to release, or designing a few maps, I'd gratefully pass them your way - though I'm not sure if they'll run on Linux (through Mono or something?).

Another few boxes done - probably tweak some of it before I'm finished, but you can see the idea.

Dave, it's truly an excellent piece of work!! I'm really chuffed that you've done that, and now it just remains for me to finish the blimmin' thing!

Before I can really continue on the Beeb side, I need to get my design tools finished. I already have most of a serviceable monster sprite editor written now (just want to put in a few high level editing things like copy/paste block, mirror selected area, this kind of thing...); then I'll rip the guts out of that and use it for the scenery editor. The most complicated one will be the map editor, but C# actually makes all this kind of stuff so easy to write!

Then, I can start to prepare new monsters and new maps! (...and also, maybe now's a good time to ask if anyone would be interested in a bit of level/sprite design further down the line?)

I'd be happy to take a look at one or the other, when the opportunity arises.

Great stuff, Rich. I think it'd be cool if you could make that sprite editor into a generic general-purpose tool which might be usable with other projects. I know Francis has/had plans for such a thing, but I don't think having alternatives is a bad idea. I wish I'd had one of those a while back ...

I suspect getting it to work in Mono would probably be more pain than it's worth. There's probably a better chance of getting it to work with WINE ... though I'm sure we can play with it if you get a build out.

I like the diary updates ... like a nerdy version of Adrian Mole. I actually think this kind of diary may well help someone else thinking about picking up a 6502 project. Dave J's work is awesome too - I like that we're moving away from the obviously Superior Software-derivative stuff. As much as I loved the classic Superior marketing, I do think we should be putting our own stamp on things too.

Brilliant progress, though. Well done!

Sam.

To get the .NET editors working on GNU/Linux, you have to install the *Windows* version of Mono in WINE.

It's funny, because when I used to use Um-Bongo (before it went all yucky and purple), the first thing I always did after an install was remove Mono. And now I'm putting it onto Fedora

I find that using The GIMP with the BBC Image Converter is the most convenient way for me to design Beeb graphics.

Nice... I'm looking forward to this

Enjoying reading the development diary too.

It should be reasonably straightforward to create a generic sprite editor app from it, so maybe I'll do that sometime. Just need to think about the user interface - whether all sprites in a file should be the same size, or whether to allow a mixture of sizes, and have the editor output some kind of text file which can be included in your assembler source file, which contains a list of memory offsets for each sprite.


Yep, I'm really happy with how it's all going, and Dave's work has been brilliant. Keeping the diary is a little bit of extra fun for me, both as a way of documenting and clarifying my thoughts, as well as giving me a bit of extra motivation, and being able to show that progress is being made!

Right now I've started on the map editor - this is the biggy, as I need to use some C# winforms components which I've never tried before... yikes!

Bit late to the party but nice work, love the cartoon strip too!


Edit: Also agree with that too

I'd be interested in doing some level designs, not sure how good they'd be but willing to have a go, do you know yet how they'd be done? with a level editor ? or in the traditional method of graph paper then converted into code?