I’ve had an entire day to myself and put it to good use, so I thought I’d make a post about it to confirm that yes, I’m all set for a demo release on Saturday. Today’s been spent fiddling with a few little presentation issues. Y’see, when you’re making something that’ll be displayed on a television, like a movie or a TV show or a game, you have to make sure that all the important bits (like titles, menus and scores) all fit on the screen. Every television (even modern HD ones, or at least a very large number of them) has a ‘feature’ called overscan, which means that not every bit of the picture makes it to somewhere visible on the screen. For example, when I hook my PC up to my TV and then set the resolution to 1920×1080, all the bits around the edges of the screen (like the taskbar) don’t fit on the screen I can see. So you can imagine how important it is that I try to keep things like your score and your character and the baddies in the safe, visible area.

Target; 2009 is now aimed at a 1280×720 resolution. There was a point when it could handle any arbitrary resolution, but that’s gone now - it’s 1280×720, 640×480 or nothing at all. (Don’t worry if your monitor can’t handle 720p, you’re not really losing anything - the 2xSai antialiasing technique only takes us so far.) Now, you might think that this makes things nice and easy for me - TV or monitor, and don’t worry about safe areas on monitors. Well, it’s not that simple unfortunately - what about the people who’ll be using 640×480 on a TV?

Anyway, it’s all rejigged now, menus and all. The only downside is that I can’t find the cable I need to hook my PC up to my trusty old Standard Def telly to be sure that the text is all readable. I’m hoping that one of you lot will be able to test it for me later.

Not long after I released Target; 2006, I started thinking about what other games I’d like to remake. (I even made a list.) Somewhere around the top was EA’s Desert Strike. Well, I thought, how hard could it be?

A couple of weeks of graphic-ripping later, I realised that despite the extensive design notes I’d made, ripping all those sprites was still going to be the most time-consuming part of the project. And then I decided I wanted to do Contact Sam Cruise instead.

Now, of course, I’ve already got two projects actively on the go - Target; 2008 and the other one. But, well… after getting some interest from the Desert Strike demo yesterday, I spent today messing about with that instead. Tch, eh?

So here’s another demo - you can now pick up the soldiers who wave at you and drop them off at the landing zone on the coast.

In the meantime, I’ve also been considering the graphical style of Target; 2008. All that pixellation’s a bit blegh, and while poking around I stumbled across the Sonic 2 High Definition project. And then started to wonder - what would a High-Def Target; Renegade look like?

I’ve just found a pencil, so expect something truly awful-looking soon.