One of the things that’s struck me whilst going through and actually playing Jetboard Joust (rather than working on individual parts in isolation) is that one of the most satisfying aspects of the game is when you get to take out loads of enemies in one go with a really destructive weapon such as the R.P.G. or Grenade Launcher.

So I decided to emphasise this side of the gameplay a little more before I finally drew a line under enemies and weapon types. I wanted to add some more ‘swarm’ type enemies and another super-destructive weapon to assist in taking them out.

Rather than work on new enemies from scratch (I really need to get this game done!!) I thought I’d re-engineer some of the ancillary enemies I’d created for the boss fights. There’s three of these, and they all fit together pretty well as a kind of ‘set’ of weird alien invertebrates – jellyfish, squid, and a kind of carnivorous worm!



Given the nature of these enemies, and that fact that they’re only going to exist in fairly large batches, I thought it would be nice to have them born from some kind of egg sack rather than teleporting into the game individually like everything else. I spent a fair bit of time working on a nice, pulsating egg sack(!) and think the end result works pretty well. The egg sack is the same for each time of enemy but I quite like the idea that you’re not quite sure what you’ll be in store for when you burst it open!



Then, just because I wanted to, I also added another enemy that’s like a really tiny version of the baiter-inspired enemy that acts as the game’s time cop. As it looks like a tiny UFO it’s also a reference to the big and little UFOs in Asteroids. These don’t spawn from egg sacks though!



The new weapon is something I’d been thinking about for some time (and even unsuccessfully experimented with a bit) but only became a solid idea after seeing the scene where Rico takes out the tanker bug in Starship Troopers (shown above - sorry to keep going on about that film).

I’m calling it the ‘Cluster Bomb’ – it fires a single explosive charge which splits into several smaller charges when it explodes, these smaller charges then repeat the procedure. Each charge is sticky, which means it will become attached to any enemy that comes into contact with it. The charges only detonate after a certain time period, not on impact.



As you can imagine, this weapon rapidly creates full-on mayhem. Originally I had each charge leaving a smoke trail when it explodes but, unfortunately, this was causing the refresh rate to drop when tons of charges were fired at once (by the player and enemies) so I think I’m going to have to stick to just using particles for most of the explosions. Shame, as it looked really cool with all the smoke, but I guess running all those individual custom shaders at once is asking too much. In later versions I’ve added a very slight randomness to the time the charges deonate so everything’s not quite so symmetrical, I think I prefer it like this.

I’ve also been working on a couple of new palettes. One using the (now slightly #indiedev cliché) red and black ‘Downwell’ style palette and another based on the colours available on the Commodore 64. I really like the C64 one. As I was always a Spectrum guy I’m realising the genius of whoever picked those 16 colours 35 years too late! I like the Downwell palette too but I couldn’t get it to work with visually with the background parallax so I decided to lose the background and stick with the three colours. It is retro after all…