ASCII Bill Invaders - progress report

Current Version in development is I8

ASCII Bill Invaders is still plodding on through towards Beta stage, although I keep adding stuff which then breaks the game in some way, or becomes impossible to implement later. Last week I'd added 3 new modes, Full Screen AGA 16, 64 and 256 colours, although it is only possible to have the correct enemy colours on one of these modes, which is the 256 colour version. So why did I bother to add modes which are broken? I dont know? :(

I also recently added the option for 1 or 2 players. When player 1 loses all lives, it would then reset the game and start player twos run. But I havent finished coding this in the game yet. There is also a new intro sequence with ASCII Bill, and a new game complete screen if you beat all three levels, in ASCII and also as a picture in Bill mode. I spent most time recently re-writing the game title menu, so it clumps the options closer together, and removed the asterisks which causes issues with the backdrop. So for me the menu now looks worse, and not as fun as it did. But it looks just a bit too packed with the Players option added. So it went from looking bad to worse. But its done now. The AGA mode is currently messing up the enemy patterns, and putting the scores in the wrong places, but apart from that it seems almost done. However, there is a major crash bug which has crept in, and I havent managed to solve the crash bug when players return to the menu. One option would be to put the menu and the game on the same screen, instead of moving between appropriate cards / screens, but I havent got to testing this out yet. The whole thing is a headache and not very enjoyable at this stage.