Too many things are going on! Firstly, Wormhole finally got a full screen toggle switch. I've been putting this off because last time I tried to do such a thing - many years ago using Cocos2d - and it didn't work. Actually it wasn't my fault - at the time it barely worked in Cocos but I didn't know this until much grief was experienced. Since then, well, the scars still run deep. It's still a slightly tricky thing to do as you have to rendering to a texture and then scaling it up to whatever the full screen mode sets itself to. But I had, have delayed for months, the whole thing running perfectly after a couple of hours. That's how it goes with game coding!

Now then, the other project... The plan was to program the Spectrum Next project using its new many-coloured Layer2 mode. Not just that, but isometric, too. This meant software sprites, and scrolling of the screen. After some old-school border colour based timing experiments, I began to get cold feet about this. So, we're changing the perspective to a simple x,y view that means we can use the Next's hardware sprites and place them above the Layer 2 backdrop. This will hopefully give us the speed required, and hence, the gameplay too. And that's what really matters.

I've therefore spent a couple of days rejigging the Lua prototype version for these changes, and will head back into Z80 world next week. Wish me luck with that!

Speaking of Z80, though, after decades away it appears I can still cut it. It's very hard work and you have to slip into a zone in order to be able to see what it is you are looking at, and that zone is deeper and narrower than for any other other coding. It's call machine-language for a reason I guess.

I might show the Speccy game next week :)

I'm still unpacking my old stuff and just look at these that I have found. They are templar key rings that were made as part of the Broken Sword promotion back in the 90's. There were never many made and Revolution got maybe 30 of them. I've used one ever since. They are really nice. Solid pewter I believe. Anyway, I now have an additional three untouched ones. I am wondering if Broken Sword fans would also like them? In theory, they could be reproduced from one of my new examples...