In honour of Draw Muhammad Day, I bring you the latest screenshot of Target; 200X:

I now return you to your regularly scheduled lethargy.

The last few weeks have been pretty busy for me. I spent one whole week taking a multiple book-led crash course in C# and XNA, with the goal being to write a game for the XBox 360. Not this game of course; I don’t think I could make it portable across Linux then (and there are a few of you Linux-users, I know!). The Tenth Crusade, on the other hand, has been entirely rewritten from scratch, and in a different language, and expanded on. (I have a not-inconceivable goal of a January release, with the hope of making enough money to quit my job and write games for a living. If you hadn’t already guessed, I’m a very optimistic person. You should see my design documents.)

Now, Target; 2008 will be serving a slightly different purpose. My coding style is, well… functional is probably the nicest way of putting it. While technically C++, it is more C with classes. Target; 2006 in particular is a horrendous mess, what with its rather convoluted development story. So I’m going to rewrite it from scratch, and do it properly. I really need to up my game when it comes to C++, and this would be an excellent way to do it.

‘Madness!‘ I hear you cry. And you’re probably right. After all, most of the code is done, I just need to, y’know, finish up a few things. So I might just chicken out and rewrite the existing code. On the other hand, there are both bugs and code left from 2004, so I don’t know yet.

On the plus side, while finishing this game by the end of the year is very unlikely, it does give me more time to think up more cool stuff to put in.

So I was rewriting the level logic code (the stuff that handles the unique bits that each level has, like the train, or the unusual design of the car park) last week when I had a sudden flash of inspiration - wouldn’t all this be simpler if I did it in Lua? Lua, that fantastic scripting language that I’m using for AI handling in The Tenth Crusade and Contact Sam Cruise. So on Friday I got cracking.
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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.